Any piece of work starts with the gathering of requirements, typically from clients or senior stakeholders. these are best extracted by first defining the problem users are experiencing and then the value proposition or the clients desired outcome they wish to achieve and over what period of time they wish to see this change implemented. By doing this we draw a line under the motivation and strategy driving the change and our target or measure for success.

Setting expectations is critical at this stage so it is essential then to determine early on, the state or presence of legacy artifacts, documentation,  analytics, business/ user flows, designs, wireframes etc., Understanding what we are working with or what will need to be produced.

Meeting and getting to know your key stakeholders, business,  product and technical specialists is equally important. You’ll without doubt need to rely on their expertise and product knowledge to help formulate the desired solution to come.

The who? The what? The where? - Yes it’s question time. And with so many questions to answer, information is key.  Understanding the problem by using both qualitative and quantitative data  is vital in articulating the scale of the problem. In evidence based, user centred design, it is essential to define who our audience is by means of existing mi, analytics, data, personas etc. If this information does not exist we need to research and collect it ourselves.

Understand what your customers motivations are and discover the pain points they experience or key drop off areas throughout the journey. Check to see if all demographics experience the same issues and what do these metrics look like on various devices. do the same friction points exist. If not, why? Discover the reasons for friction - what are we asking our customers to do and why?

Examining user activity by means of flow analysis, or video recordings of user sessions and even contextual enquiry helps to better inform us as to the landscape we are working in and helps to formulate our assumptions and hypothesese which will make up the main drivers for  the process to come. For existing systems simple heuristic analysis can also provide valuable insight and help to pinpoint design and usability flaws.

Once we’ve defined our users, the problem they are facing, our hypothosese and assumptions I tend to want to start formulating a vision for the solution without prejudice to a means or a specific UI or interface as well as defining a scope for the project or ring fencing what we are focussing on and what we are not. One simply can’t boil the whole ocean so focus and discipline is key. A good way to do this is through user story mapping which helps define at a granular level what a specific user wants and why and helps us build logical self contained minimum viable products offering the highest value which we can release to our users in the shortest possible timeframe. User stories typically are derived from our assumptions formed by our research blended with a bit of common sense.

Other aspects of scope definition include taking the time to interact with other key stakeholders and experts to understand what restrictions or limitations we will face including existing business or back office processes, security, existing technology, legacy systems, skill shortages etc. and knowing what can change and what can’t. Experience is key in understanding most projects are not opportunities for ‘blue sky’ design.

Once all the pieces of the puzzle are out of the box the exciting bit begins. This is generally my most favourite part of the design process - pushing out ideas and finding a solution. As we already have the user stories and  know what we want the outcome to be, this part of the process is more about facilitating that outcome whilst satisfying the users needs, Defining from a high level what the user flow be like, what the user will experience end to end. The exact details of this will be better refined through the next few stages.

Brainstorming with team members or product specialists on large whiteboards and wasting loads of paper is all part of the process. Design studios are great for this type of activity and often a project outsider may have an enlightening insight into this. Using a process of divergence and convergence we can start to drill down into what ideas fit into the required criteria.

Once we know what solution we are going with I like to drill down into the finer details of this by mapping complete and highly detailed end to end user journeys.

Your high level or golden path journey derived from the previous step is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of potential scenarios a user will encounter whilst undertaking a journey. Just like a conversation, every option or junction in the journey gives rise to a myriad of additional outcomes you need to accomodate and hence screens you need to design for. All of these screens need to be meticulously and diligently mapped out within your flow diagrams to ensure the system is complete and all scenarios are accomodated for including intentional and unintentional user drop offs, system failures etc.

User flows should accomodate all users of the system including any back office staff or adminstrators who will use the system.

Working in conjunction with a business analyst usually helps to ensure your flows match up and work with existing backend and back office flows.

Using my favourite tool Axure RP (which i’ve used to build this site), I like to build out the solution as close to how it will appear in live. Typically these high fidelity protoytpes will be used in user testing sessions, but before I get there I start with simple wireframes.

Wireframing helps quickly define according to the previously created flows, the page flow, individual page layouts and ensure all assets, elements and data points required for the backend etc have been placed on the page.

Applying common design standards and patterns and heuristic analysis blended with the users requirements and common sense typically bakes a good tasting pie.

I often find that visually articulating the solution in a higher degree of fidelity is the best way to achieve quality feedback and buy in from influencial stakeholders who potentially lack the ability to visualise ideas from simple paper sketches.

Validating our assumptions and designs is best done by testing them on real authentic users before they get to sign off and development stages. Our designs carry the hypotheses we are asserting or assuming and by proving or disproving these we can head into the development stages with a lot more confidence that our product is robust and has limited usability issues.

These sessions are quick to set up so i often like to put a  design to the sword as soon as its ready. Tapping into your own users for insights is a priceless exercise. Watching your users use your product, navigate your design be it successfully or unsuccessfully gives you first hand feedback into real usability issues. The fact that these sessions are typically only over a period of a day one can quickly iterate and make the required changes based on ones findings.

Designing for your audience is key.  Although I generally design across multiple platforms in a pure responsive fashion, sometimes the emphasis or implementation may vary across whichever device is dominant across the user base. I typically research metrics like screen sizes and device usage to help target specific user groups and ensure the design achieves a high level of usability across all required devices. I am well versed in working both from corporate styleguides and asset libraries as well as creating designs and assets completely from scratch.

Other aspects of UI design I like to focus on is micro interactions, animation and choreography of elements. Content and copy writing is another often overlooked aspect of UI design often palmed off to a copywriter to work on and feed back into the cms, often resulting in not so favourable designs and usability issues. As a lead designer I often insist on having control over the visual aspect of copy. from a  UX perspective, copy is an integral part of the conversation and as such its imperative that a UX designer has control over this.

A designers responsibility to the delivery team cannot be overstated enough. As a stickler for detail and pixel perfection, I have a lifetime worth of experience in creating highly detailed design and content specifications that visually articulate the designed solution comprehensively and in high fidelity within one document for use by onshore and offshore development teams alike. The creation of such documentation has proved priceless in ensuring consistency between design, development and quality assurance, helping on almost every occassion to mitigate ambiguity, the need for lengthy explanations across multiple teams and reduce the occurence of defects in development and the subsequent lengthy and costly effects of remedying this.

Producing detailed documentation allows for future teams to easily reference, learn and understand the piece of work without having to go through the pains it took to create - thus allowing for easy knowledge transfer.

That said, I am equally at home providing assets and artifacts in a lean or agile fashion. Each project and team is different utilising various methodologies and I adapt to the requirement of documentation as needed.

This period is often a  nervous time as you watch the results of your hard work come to fruition in the real world. Ensuring that all pages are set up to be tracked and monitored is essential to this phase.

Using tools such as inspectlet and hotjar allow you to view live recorded user sessions. Reviewing daily analytics reports are the order of the day.

Another great technique for real world validation is a partial release or A/B Testing, comparing your design to the current live version, turning up or down the exposure depending on the level of success.

Learning quick from any failures and acting fast to make any required changes based on your findings is important in ensuring you continually and incrementally improve and fine tune the product. Its a cycle that repeats as many times as is needed to until the criteria for success defined at the start of the project has been achieved or exceeded.

A year long waterfall project which saw me deep diving into the dark corners of SAP CRM and back office business processes to understand the intricate and complex world of business energy brokers.

The core focus of this ambitious and highly complex project was to build a self standing online portal for associate energy brokers to register and manage leads, quotes, sales, renewals and key documents end to end.

As project lead I engaged with numerous product specialists and key stakeholders to basically translate what was essentially an offline traditional brick and mortar process into an efficient online experience, and in the process creating highly extensive documentation and detailed artifacts eg. user journeys, business flows, prototypes and high fidelity designs across a multitude of core sections of functionality including creating a quotation, sales, renewals engine, a tenders system,  reporting and document storage functionality etc.

Working as design lead alongside a small core product and development team at this privately funded startup based in California, I helped design a full online micro events booking and management service.

 Built from the ground up Skedity.com allows businesses to host events eg. a yoga class, sell tickets, promote and manage their attendees all through the website and online management system.

Using an Agile approach we quickly designed and developed a working prototype which was released and tested on a target audience. Quick response to this initial feedback allowed us to make the neccessary changes and put the finishing touches to the first MVP.  More guerilla testing and A/B tests helped validate and direct design decisions.

Over 6 months I had helped in creating a large repetoire of functionality including sign up journeys for vendors and customers as well as a comprehensive event creation/ management backend for vendors and client account management services amongst others.

Using my growing knowledge of the intricacies of the business energy world, I was requested to rebuild the existing online quotation/sales and renewals journeys which had poor end to end journey conversions of 14% and 16% respectively.

After undertaking extensive research of users current activity and analysing existing data  and analytics I was able to pin point various pain points and areas of friction. user testing and video recordings of live users helped highlight the reasons behind these drop off points.

Armed with all this data I was able to succesfully present to senior stakeholders a series of remedies and redesigns which were put into development.

After just 3 months of release, journey conversions were up significantly from 14% to 70% for quotes and renewals conversions has more than doubled with a 115% increase.

Working as lead designer for this Index Ventures funded London startup I had the opportunity to work on a myriad of complex projects serving an active audience of over 500,000 freelancers globally.

Working in a fast paced metrics driven agile environment, our bi weekly sprints delivered an endless stream of core functionality and user value including job postings, freelancer listings, buyer and seller profiles, search, invoicing, dual currency transactions, payments, escrow, bidding, messaging, community forum and our very own social network all from the ground up.

Using a  variety of face to face user testing, A/B testing, user forums and daily analytics we were able to listen to our users and iterate quickly, constantly fine-tuning the website with user centred value based changes

British Gas were experiencing a large number of calls for tasks users should be performing online and facing the rising cost of maintaining a call centre operation to handle such calls. Despite providing customers with an online account few used it.

Unfortunately the first implementation of an online account was poor with low registration conversion, low interaction and repeat visits by registered users, low conversion rates for online self service journeys and a large number of enquiries about missing accounts amongst others.

As UX lead I reengineered the registration journey leading to a journey  conversion rate improvement from  26% to 70% and reduced a 30 - 90 day wait for adding missing accounts to ones online profile to a simple 5 minute process (for 2-3,000 customres a month) - leading to a massive FTE reduction in call centre costs, increase in customer satisfaction and online usage and simplification of a process which used to span 3 continents and 5 teams.

Using an evidence based, analytics backed approach, I worked on and successfully optimisied a series of functional journeys including meter reads, introducing a credit card payment journey and online billing functionality

Further sessions of user testing validated my assumptions for changing to a task based navigation system from the current account based navigation. This would allow for improved usability, better navigation and exposing features and functionality better .

 As lead UX I led  a  full redesign of the online account management system involving a large amount of analytics, user testing, journey mapping, structure mapping, prototyping and conceptual design.

Tetrapak is one of the largest and most influencial packaging manufacturers in the world and is seen as a market and industry leader in sustainability and innovation.

I have worked on numerous websites including blogs for the respective CEO’s of their US and Canadian operations as well as multiple micro sites for their various green initiatives and industry events.

All sites are designed responsively across desktop, tablet and mobile.

Other design work has included designing marketing banners and email templates for their various initiatives and events.

Using my experience of online marketplaces, I was further involved with two other freelancer marketplaces.

Working with smaller budgets I was able to design and deliver complete end to end freelancer marketplaces for both clients offering a full spectrum of functionality including job posting and listings, freelancer profiles, registration, job, profile and account management for providers and buyers alike.

Low fidelity wireframing guided the design process, along with higher fidelity prototypes and numerous sessions of guerilla  user testing to gain insights and finetune designs

Once the designs had been validated they were transformed into high fidelity designs along with documentation and put into development

Over the last 4 years I have been involved in numerous redesign projects for British Gas Business helping transform their ageing site.

My role as lead UX designer involved a full site audit and examination of the current navigation, and page layouts for 1st and 2nd tier pages. I conducted various user testing sessions and uncovering usability and navigational issues which we sought to remedy.

The redesign of the homepage and navigation to be fully responsive went through various iterations and versions on the back of testing and key metrics  and proved to be a continual work in progress.

Additionally I helped redesign other areas of the site including the business blog.

As a lead visual designer I’ve worked on a large number of brochure sites for agencies in New York, Chicago, London and California, across varying sectors including private banking, charities and small and large businesses alike

I strive for a high level of contemporary pixel perfect design, designing responsively for the most common breakpoints and devices. over the years I have built up a large repetoire and designed 1000’s of pages for clients typically in Photoshop or Fireworks.

I am well versed in designing from corporate styleguides where neccessary but equally pride myself in having designed more than 90% of my clients sites from scratch.

I’ve worked on and designed a variety of online stores across many different business sectors utilising many different platforms including Magento, Opencart, Shopify, Zencart etc.

I have acquired in the process a fairly good understanding of the intricacies of ecommerce sites, both backend and frontend from product management, to account creation, payments, invoicing, order management, shopping baskets, checkout process and subscription based plans, food delivery etc.