Happy New Year to all! Wishing you all a creative 2023 filled with stunning design and beautiful UI/UX!
Categories
Seasons Greetings
Just to say all the best for the festive season and hope that you have an excellent time with family and friends. Wishing you a very happy new year and a great 2023!
Categories
UX Brighton
Well it’s been a while! But I was very glad to having bought my ticket and headed into Brighton to attend this conference once again.
Really good to see it up and running again after the break for the pandemic and good to attend a design orientated conference. I also caught up with some old designer friends that I’ve previously worked with in Brighton.
There were some inspirational speakers with the day’s theme being focused on Product Design and Management. As ever I took lots of notes to mull over and themes to explore over the coming weeks.
UX Brighton always inspires me and I enjoy the takeaways that I can bring into my design practice and career.
Categories
Design Collaboration
We have a new member of my budding design team! I’m very pleased to welcome our latest employee, an experienced UX/UI Designer, who will be working along me in our wider product team.
This increases our company’s product design capacity and gives valuable design collaboration opportunities to our product owners, stakeholders, developers and of course myself.
I’m researching methods of sharing Figma files so we can work closely on design concepts and further build out the style guide that I originally created.
The future looks very positive for us and how we can really contribute to creating and bring to market further user focused products.
I’ve been working on mobile prototypes and design screen concepts to support our sales team. They deliver webinars that we’re presenting to groups of potential clients that represent large health care organisations.
Using Figma I create screen flows of our products to highlight key screens to show our product features and overall look and feel. The demos help show current and future features that are live or currently in production.
I’m also working on a wider mobile design project as part of a back-end system upgrade project which is underway. I’m looking at our app’s UX and UI, the user journey, improved performance and resolving usability bugs. It’s good to work with our mobile development team during this project and collaborate on mobile functionality.
We have end-users ready for user testing of our new app once it has progressed through our internal test and UAT process. I’m looking forward to getting this user feedback on our app and to see it go live.
This project will improve the user experience of our audience and bring an much improved mobile app to market.
Categories
UX/UI Backlog
I’ve been working on a design audit of our live products, I’m looking for anything that will help us bring together our cross product look and feel. Picking up anything that is inconsistent in the UI and generally aiming for brand unity.
Following on from this recent work I’m capturing the UI and UX inconsistencies in the form of a UX/UI backlog. This helps to formalise the tasks in the form of user stories for our senior developers to estimate the work. This can then be scheduled in by our product owners and bought into future sprints for production.
Keeping the estimated user stories light and manageable help the work to be picked up by our dev teams when they have capacity and are available to work on the UI items.
I’m aiming to improve our products with a unified look and feel and keeping our UI consistent helps to deliver an improved user experience. This helps to bring our products to our users as a single brand.
Categories
Product UI Consistency
It can be a challenge bringing consistency to multiple products which are available from the same company. It’s important to present a uniform look and feel to the end user so they can see the relationship within the product suite.
I’m currently working on a group of products that have been developed with by seperate dev teams. They have evolved to have a range of inconsistencies and with the lack of a style guide in place there is no single source of truth for design.
Working with the product owners is key and our technical authors have experienced and helpful attention to detail. Seeing the bigger picture is a must to spot how UI elements and tasks are handled in the different product systems.
This project also builds towards a future design system where each UI component’s use case is detailed for the whole company to refer to. Other benefits are that UI components are understood by all in the production and test teams and new starters can quickly get up to speed with the available UI components.
My current UI/UX challenge is designing a complex rostering solution for NHS workers. Working in close collaboration with our stakeholders, product owners and the development teams we have been progressing through our user stories. We are working towards producing an intuaitive solution for the busy keyworkers in our hospitals.
This is part of a larger project to streamline how our health workers can plan their working days with accessible and usable shift information. We have many user groups and aim to cater for a variety of end-users who will access their information on mobile devices.
An easy to use, paperless digital staff rostering solution should make the NHS end-users’s life easier. This is a system that can be built on into the future and it’s great to be involved and to be at the heart of this health care project.
Categories
Style Guides
At the start of the year I took on a new challenge and a new job. I’m now working for a Uk based NHS approved supplier and again find myself as the sole lead UI/UX designer tasked with bringing consistency to an established product suite.
Working in the product team I began this project with a design audit in order to establish the common look and feel for the Workforce division. This is area of the business has a primary focus of working with NHS staff to roster work patterns and allow managers to organise their hospital departments.
I produced a series of screen comparisons in Figma which I went on to build into a style guide. The guide is now in its second version and is based on Atomic Design where UI components build into common, reusable design patterns and then onto page templates.
I enjoy bringing order to agile teams with organised design and having a single source of truth ultimately speeds up software production and creates an efficient production environment. I feel that this is the start of this process and I’m hoping to introduce a design system once the style guide is further along the line.
The design system project that I’m currently leading on is moving forward well. We are now in the testing phase after building out our digital product UI components in Figma with a Zeroheight front end.
We are testing with a small group of developers and test analysts which have been made available from our scrum teams. The first round has now been completed and we’re now working on refinements and the next batch of components that will be released for testing.
The design system project is coming together and it feels good to be able to bring detailed, consistent design elements to our product teams!