Category: Design

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Design Usability UX UX Design

User Feedback

Working on recent products has highlighted to me again the importance of testing usability with actual end users. This step can sometimes be overlooked when product teams are deep in stakeholder requirements and writing user stories.

Getting prototypes infront of actual users in the early discovery phase of a project can save a lot of time, money and effort. End users have a real world perspective on how the new product or system will help them perform their tasks or not as the case may be.

They may have no knowledge of your product or system and will compare it to what they have used or are currently using. They may also give some guidance on what features would be good to see on an industry level which had not previously been considered.

Prototypes can be quickly changed as they only need design team resource with no development resource involved. So the importance of early and regular user testing shouldn’t be overlooked as it’s a valuable step in modern digital product conception and production.

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Design Mobile Product design Usability UX UX Design

User Testing Prototypes

I’m currently building two Figma prototypes for a new NHS rostering solution that has a unique approach for the sector. The prototypes demonstrate the user journeys for two user groups of the new system. I’m working in close collaboration with our POs to refine the final prototypes ahead of user testing to validate our ideas based on the user stories we have created.

I’ve kept the UI as intuitive as possible so the end-users are able to use the new system in the real world. I’m also user testing early so we can make sure that we’re getting feedback on the solution well ahead of any development.

We have a focus group ready for testing and we can also access medical staff that represent the target user groups for the new system. This ensures that we can produce a digital product that engages our users whilst also addressing our stakeholder requirements and business needs.

I’ll be iterating the prototypes and system functionality as we go forward with our successive rounds of user testing. Our new rostering system is designed to integrate with our mobile app to help our medics organise their schedules and make their working day easier.

Categories
Design Digital Usability UX UX Design

UI/UX Improvements

I’m looking at making some UI/UX improvements to two of our products to improve usability and address inconsistent UI elements.

Working with our product owners and senior developers we’re going through user stories that I’ve created based on live system adjustments to our UI. I’m writing my user stories to keep these improvements end-user focused to improve our product usability and also to enhance our product’s look and feel.

Once agreed with the POs and senior devs the UI/UX tasks are estimated and bought into production. I also transfer my user stories to the respective product backlogs for the POs to implement in their sprints.

It’s good to capture these UI improvements that will enhance the user experience of our user groups. This work also improves the overall look and feel of our product suite so there is a seamless cross-product user experience.

Categories
Creative Design Design Ops Digital Mobile Product design UI Web design

Mobile Style Guide

I’ve just completed a mobile style guide to support our product team and further define our brand’s look and feel. This builds on my previous style guide that included desktop, responsive web and mobile.

Following considerable back end improvements our mobile team where implementing I was able to review several components for our app. This gave me a great opportunity to review the UX of our core functionality, we were also able to update our UI styling to a more contemporary look and feel.

Our mobile specific components were originally contained in one page of our divison’s style guide. The app design review highlighted the common components for our app and desktop and the need for a dedicated mobile style guide has been realised. This gives us much more space to provide guidance, examples and use cases for our mobile optimised components.

The new mobile style guide now includes comprehensive details of our mobile components. This style guide also builds towards a future design system that we can build at a later date.

Categories
Design Mobile Product design UI UX UX Design

Staff Organisation

It is sometimes a significant UI/UX challenge to design solutions for systems that will help organise large staff groups. In my current role I’m working on new ways to roster NHS staff for large UK based trusts.

Keeping complex systems easy to use for the main user groups is very important in my user centred approach. I’m looking at ways to make our new system both intuative and streamlined. This takes into consideration the needs of diverse user groups and a large number of users.

Being able to access large data sets for admin user on desktop and end-users being able to access the system to see their work patterns on mobile devices are key stakeholder requirements.

I like working on larger projects and this is certainly demanding on a UI/UX design level. The product and development teams currently working on this product are great to work with and we have an excellent working reationship which really helps with the production process.

Challenge is good and designing a better system is never easy but I enjoy leading the design process that can make a difference for our users.

Categories
Creative Design

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to all! Wishing you all a creative 2023 filled with stunning design and beautiful UI/UX!

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Creative Design Design Ops Digital Product design UX UX Design

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
Creative Design Design Ops

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.

Categories
Creative Design Digital Mobile Product design UX Design

Mobile Design

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
Design Design Ops Product design UI UX Web development

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.