Category: Product design

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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!

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Design Design Ops Design Team Product design UI Usability UX UX Design

Internal Design Agency

I’m working on improving our product design across our live NHS solutions for our company. This process is to formalise our design resource with an organised approach to production with our wider product team. To implement this I’m starting to run my design team as an internal design agency with a group of ‘clients’ which are our business stakeholders and senior product owners.

Introducing a unified approach to our product design has multiple advantages and this will help us to innovate and explore the best ways to help our end users engage with and use our products. On an internal level we can manage and guide our stakeholders and product owners using a design to production process that is clear and accountable.

We can approach projects in the same way with clear phases of requirements gathering and ideation. Then moving to wireframe and prototype design and iteration. Once signed off we can support the development and test teams with efficient design hand overs to build out the agreed features that match the final designs.

As we progress I can refine our design to production process to streamline the way my design team works within our wider product team. I aim to fully integrate with the wider business and become an even more valuable internal digital design resource.

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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.

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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.

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Design Mobile Product design UX

Mobile Competition

I’ve been looking at the competition for our app in the healthcare sector here in the UK. It’s a good process to review what’s available to our clients and the NHS trusts that we supply.

There is a limit to what you can see without access to these systems but you can see reviews, ratings and end user feedback. You can also see what examples of the mobile screens from marketing material and app store submissions.

Put all this together and you get a feeling for the UX and then I can compare our app against the wider market. This is useful info which can be fed back to the business, it will also give us an idea of how we can improve our app’s design.

A product design review is something I like to carry out on a periodic basis as this helps to keep the look and feel fresh. A review also allows for new feature concepts to be considered by stakeholders and product owners.

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Creative Design Ops Design Systems Mobile Product design UX

Mobile Style Guide

We’ve just released our mobile specific style guide, this builds on and compliments our desktop style guide which was released at the start of this year.

This guide is the latest collaboration with my design team, we have been working on this alongside new feature and BAU work. This guide captures our mobile optimised design patterns as they are designed and built into our app. The new guide also covers every component and design pattern that is currently live in our app.

Our new guide helps to ensure consistency as a single source of truth for our mobile development team and it will help with our onboarding process. It’s also another step towards a new design system that I hope to implement as a project that will further improve our new app feature to market speed.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.