Categories
Creative Design Digital Photography

Studying Photography

I’m pleased to say that I’ve now started my part-time photography MA course this week that commenced with a thought provoking seminar on photography in modern culture.

I’m looking at photos that haven’t seen the light of day for years, some of which I’ll add on here in my Photography page. The below is one such image which I took whilst travelling in Canada.

Ant Tyler UI/UX Design

Overall it’s great to be back and having time to focus on a slight shift in career path, a path I trod many years ago. I’m available for part-time work in product design, ui/ux design and photography so get in touch if you would like to know more.

Categories
Creative Design Digital Photography Product design UX Design

A Creative Future

I’m pleased to reflect on my recent career and the diverse nature of creativity and projects that I’m currently working on. My Lead UI/UX Designer role is winding up as I prepare for part-time study in photography. I want to continue working in the UX field as I really enjoy the creative aspect of my role and working with design and product teams.

I’m excited about doing more photography and starting new projects with old-school film and digital cameras. This work will be focusing on landscape and portrait initially but I will be working in other photographic disciplines going forward.

I’m also working on my solo singer/guitarist set with a solo gig lined up in Manchester in early September. This is a welcome addition to my band which have been going for a few years now.

I’m also writing more and working on my own songs for both the band and my solo work. I started writing every day in 2020 during lock down which I’ve kept up. I’ve started a book project which I hope to self publish when I feel ready.

So lots going on and the weather is great outside, whats not to like! I feel that these creative projects feed into each other and I’m really enjoying this experience. I’m building a creative future and I feel very positive about that prospect.

If you are feeling creative I would encourage you to just do it as there is no time like the present!

Categories
Design Design Ops Design Systems Digital Product design

UI Review and Design Systems

I’m leading on a UI review of one of our premium products looking at common UI components. This is to unify our front end to further improve the professional look and feel for this product and to ensure that our screens reflect our brand.

I’m also looking at UI consistency so that common elements render in the same way across all screens. This process helps this premium product to look professional and can be easily identified as one of our branded products in the marketplace.

Having a comprehensive collection of UI elements ensures that nothing is missed in our style guide. This helps to speed and streamline our development and test processes and increases our speed to market for new features.

This is also a positive step towards a future design system which would include code snippets for the UI elements. I’m very happy to contribute to this production process as it helps new starters and junior members of our scrum teams understand our approach to contemporary software production.

Categories
Design Digital Product design UX UX Design

Design Concepts

I’m currently working ahead of production on design concepts for our projects that are in the discovery phase. Based on stakeholder requirements these concepts help to flesh out the digital solution that will eventually be built by our development teams.

The concepts will typically cover the key screens that will enable users to perform certain tasks or access what they need from the specific service. I design the screens in Figma which are then built into prototypes that allow stakeholders and product owners to visualise how the digital solution will look. They can then review, discuss, feedback and adjust the concepts which can easily be edited.

These prototypes give insight to the product’s user journey and allow for early user testing to validate the design concepts. I enjoy this creative process as it helps early understanding of a proposed digital solution and it is an efficent process for digital product production.

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
Digital

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
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 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 Digital IA Product design UI UX

Rostering Solutions

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.