Halving time to first expense report for a spend tool
Rebuilt the first-run experience of an expense tool so new finance admins reach their first approved report in one sitting, not three.
Product designer for B2B SaaS and fintech
I get unreasonably excited about data tables
Also onboarding checklists, empty states and the exact wording of a 'card frozen' message. I'm Aiko Tanaka, and I design B2B and fintech products where the unglamorous screens do most of the work.
- 13 yrs
- designing B2B and fintech
- 40+
- products and features built
- 2–3
- clients at a time, at most
Aiko Tanaka
Product designer
Osaka, Japan
Two project slots open from January 2027
Selected work
Case studies with the numbers left in
Six projects from the last four years: the problem, the research, the decisions I'd make again and the ones I wouldn't, and what changed afterwards.
Card controls people can find in a panic
Freeze, spending limits and merchant blocks for a mobile bank, designed for the anxious minute after someone realises their card is gone.
A pricing experiment that lifted paid conversion by a fifth
Three rounds of tests on a product analytics company's pricing page, including the round that lost, and the plan structure that finally made sense to buyers.
A design system built from a freight platform's densest screen
Tokens, components and an adoption model for a freight platform built by four teams, with 41 button styles and six separate tables.
Taming a 40-column admin table for payroll specialists
Redesigned the internal table payroll specialists use to review thousands of employee records before every pay run, cutting review time and missed errors.
An accessibility overhaul for an invoicing and payments app
Took a payments app from 212 WCAG failures to a clean AA re-audit, and fixed the flows that screen reader and keyboard users depend on.
Kind words
From the people I made things with
04 notes · scroll →
Aiko Tanaka asked for our support tickets before asking for a brief. Two weeks later we had a ranked list of fixes, and the top three paid for the engagement within a quarter.
Elena VargaHead of Product, Orchard HRA rare designer who is as comfortable in a spreadsheet as in a usability session, often on the same afternoon. Our engineers asked to keep the decision log format.
Tobias BrandtEngineering Manager, Brindle CapitalWe hired for a pricing page and got a clearer plan structure, a simpler sales story and an honest write-up of the test that failed.
Grace MwangiCEO, SignalpostThe accessibility work was meticulous, but what I remember is how Aiko Tanaka brought engineering along. Nobody felt audited; everyone felt taught.
Rafael CostaProduct Lead, Quayside Pay
Have a flow that's quietly costing you customers?
Send me the flow and the number you'd like to move. I'll reply with how I'd approach it, what I'd look at first and what it would cost.
Two project slots open from January 2027