Category: UX 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 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 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 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.