User experience design

My design work is grounded in research and shaped through collaboration. I focus on interaction design, how things work, and how people move through them.

Call it user experience design, UX, usability design, user-centred design (UCD), it amounts to the same thing; giving people a great experience, whether they notice or not. And by ‘people’ I mean everyone, so accessibility is at the heart of everything I work on.

User experience design starts with service design; that high-level vision of how a service should fit together and function. Understanding the full end-to-end user journey and designing within the constraints it presents. I’ve worked on everything from sign-up processes and documentation/guidance to email notifications and fixing pain points with the human beings that sit behind a digital product/service.

Interaction design is where it gets really interesting for me; designing the way a user interacts with a website or digital product/service. I love digging into the routes a user might take on their journey, as well as the fine details of an interface that affect how they interact with it. The designs I work on are carefully thought through, accessible, user-centred and tested with real users. Some deliverables I regularly produce:

• Higher level user journey diagrams and maps
• Low fidelity wireframes
• More detailed mock-ups and basic prototypes in software like Sketch/Figma
• Code-based prototypes (built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript)

Although not my specialism, I have a solid grasp of content design and strategy; especially in areas such as page structure and prioritisation, and information architecture. The language used in an interface can greatly affect how the user progresses through a service, as well as how they interact with individual elements on a page, and this is fascinating to me.

User research is often counted as part of user experience design, and I’ve done my fair share, but I prefer to work with the information gleaned by a user researcher (as well as customer satisfaction scores, analytics and other performance metrics) to inform, iterate and validate my designs.

I often work as part of a multi-disciplinary team on public sector or design-led projects; here’s how that usually works.