Category: UX

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Design Design Ops Design Team UX UX Design

UX Cross Functional Collaboration

I’ve been looking at cross functional collaboration and training after reading posts on UX forums. It’s interesting stuff and also the views that go with this subject. I think it’s important and something that I’ve done for all of my design career.

Briefly, some benefits that can result from a well trained UX designer in your product team include improved collaboration and efficiency with wider product team. This results in a quicker time bringing products to market. A range of diverse perspectives will lead to more creative solutions and improved team adapatability.

Along with improved employee engagement there are clearly advantages to deepening your understanding the way your product team works. So start today and improve your collaboration and efficiency working with yur product team.

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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 UX UX Design

UX Benchmarking

I’ve been working on implementing a UX Benchmarking strategy for our products. We’re gathering more data now and it’s going to be a busy year for us with new products coming to market.

UX Benchmarking is a great way to show our progress as our products develop and we get better at what we do. Being able to demonstrate how our users are responding to our systems in the real work will be great for our stakeholders.

Also UX Benchmarking is a valuable process and putting together our process has been an enjoyable process.

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Design Design Ops UX

Design Teams

I’ve been working on expanding my design team to further support our product owners and development teams. Increased design capacity can help to support a wide range of visualisation and creative outputs that will benefit the whole company.

Getting the right fit is really improtant and ensuring that a new designer feels comfortable and welcome in the design team is key. Stakeholder engagement and being able to support projects in the discovery and elaboration phases is also on my radar. Also being able to provide prototypes for the sales team as they engage new clients becomes possible with more design team members.

I look forward to the new year with increased design capacity and more hands on my design deck. So we’re able to tackle the creative challenges that the new year will being!

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 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 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.