Justin Stach heads up the web design and user experience team at Zopa: the world’s first lending and borrowing marketplace.

Here we get a peek at a couple of days in his working diary.

My background's in architecture, which taught me a lot about studying people's needs and behaviour and how to turn resolve those into specific requirements which need both highly-technical and effective aesthetic responses. One of the things I love about being an Interaction Designer is that it's both art and science.

Monday - Like most mornings, this one starts with me coming into the office when it's still quiet and reading through various emails and communications that I'll need to be aware of throughout the day.

It's also the time that I read through the various blogs and feeds that I'm subscribed to, so that I can get a sense of what's going on in the wider design world.

The field I'm in moves pretty quickly, and although I've fallen behind the curve in terms of sitting down and writing code (thankfully the people I work with are incredibly good at that), it's still important that I know what's going on in the world of web and user-experience.

The rest of the morning is spent with Zopa's Sales & Marketing Director and my team's designer talking through a brief for a new homepage.

We're about to go into beta with a huge new change to our product, which will allow people to have total control over how they lend and borrow money through the Zopa system: people will create profiles and give information about themselves, their finances and the sort of rate they're willing to pay and then lenders will search through these and make offers for some or all of the money at a rate they decide.

Communicating this clearly is the challenge.

In the afternoon, I spend some time finalising the plan for integrating the product into the existing site. It seems very late in the day to be working on something as essential as navigation, and it is. One of the challenges about working for a small startup company is that things change very, very quickly indeed. You need to be able to change direction very quickly.

Tuesday - Every day at 9.30am all of Zopa get together in the various offices and we have a conference call. We're still small enough for this to be really productive, and since we introduced it it's made a real difference to the communication between the teams.

Each team goes through what's on their to-do list for that day and gives a very brief recap to everyone else about anything they think needs to be shared: project statuses, member issues, bugs, news or even just things to be considered.

Continuing yesterday's navigation work, I realise that the only way we're going to be able to do this properly is for us to widen the working space on the page. Zopa's site has changed a lot in the last 18 months, but the thing that didn't get done was to use more of the screen.

The introduction of the new product gives me a perfect excuse. I spend some time working out a plan that might work without forcing an entire rewrite of big swathes of code. Once I'm happy with the idea, I hand it over to someone who can take the idea and turn it into something real and do the hard work of actually writing the code and testing it.

This is what makes my work so enjoyable: working at the design end of the site and seeing my ideas come to fruition. I think that working in user experience and web design requires a certain skill set and a degree of flexibility. It is not a regular nine to five role. You need to have a vision of what you’d like to make and the ability to think creatively. .

Check out what I do at www.zopa.co.uk.

You can even let me know what you think on our user forum.

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