I've been doing design stuff professionally since 2006.
These days I tend to go by the titles of Senior UX Consultant or Senior Product Designer, but my ideal job title is probably Lead Design Wizard.
I am deeply passionate about creating enjoyable, accessible experiences that have a positive impact on the world.
Download my CVCrafting a product or service with the goal of providing the people who use it with a useful, delightful, constructive and pain-free experience. If done well, UX design is invisible.
This includes things like understanding use cases and user needs, designing desired user journeys, as well as creating wireframes and prototypes. It can also involve formulating personas, facilitating co-creation workshops, and eloquently presenting convincing design reasoning to stakeholders.
Creating user interfaces that are accessible, discoverable, appropriate to the use cases, and enjoyable for the target audience.
Creating style guides, design systems, medium-to-high fidelity interface prototypes all fall under the remit of UI design. If you can create coded prototypes and design with practical code considerations in mind (which I can) then even better.
Gathering the appropriate quantitive and qualitative information to identify, assess, test, and validate design hypotheses and decisions.
This may involve gathering direct information gathering such as user interviews and analytics; or indirect methods like ethnographic studies and public datasets. Analysing this data and providing insights to inform designers and other decision-makers is another crucial part of this skill-set.
Crafting the written elements of a product or service, and the identity around it.
This often involves identifying and/or defining the required tone and voice, taxonomic structure, SEO considerations, and writing copy to suit all of these. It can also mean designing information architecture, content strategies and even engagement drives.
Making the visual assets used to communicate meaning, tone, intent and appeal to the people experiencing the product or service.
Brand design, photography, image editing, digital painting, vector artwork and colour theory all play their part in a good graphic designer's arsenal. Which is lucky for me, because these were literally my main work for some of my freelance years.
Sculpting end-to-end processes that best serve the confluence of user and business needs.
Service designers will commonly build artifacts such as service blueprints, journey maps, and strategy documents. Communication and decision-making skills are crucial to this role, as it often involves being the bridge between other design fields, development teams, and senior stakeholders.
An increasingly urgent aspect of the design landscape that works to ensure minimisation of risks, mitigates potential harms, and maximises the positive impact of what we create.
This involves employing relatively new tools such as consequence scanning and ethical canvases; as well as a solid understanding of ethical & meta-ethical theory, broad knowledge of relevant legal actions, and a strong moral compass. My background in philsophy comes in very handy here.
Essential, but often overlooked, is the need for designs to be accessible.
I also do quite a good job of optimising websites for accessibility and performance. You can see how effective I can be by checking out the Google PageSpeed report for this very portfolio, which I built myself from scratch.
For the people who prefer information in lists instead of narratives, here's an alphabetised list of my core skills and areas of expertise. So you can hit that old ctrl+F shortcut to easily see if something's in my skillset.
This case study is a summary of the activities I took part in during a two-year stretch as a senior UX consultant on a government-sponsored project. I cannot disclose the identity of the client for security reasons, and all details in the images have been altered or obscured to ensure the integrity of the finished work.
I have not made a distinction between my own exact role in the activities described, or which were my own idea. The team worked together as a collaborative unit, and so claiming sole ownership of any particular elements would be disingenuous. I contributed to all activities described, owning some and assisting with others. It is intended to describe a positive design process that I would repeat again (after applying some learnings, of course), and stand as an exmaple of the depth of experience I have.
A system for criminal background checks needed to retire their legacy application and processing system. This included resolving a large number of requirements, including:
There was a lot of unknowns to make known before we could get very far. Just some of the questions we had to answer:
We set about finding out the answers to those questions from a user-focused perspective, using all the tools we could apply to the problem:
Accompanying the user research, we also needed firm business requirements to ensure that what we built would perform the functions required of it:
The core design team consisted of user researchers, UX &UI designers, service designers, developers and BAs. We also ran regular co-design workshops to include senior stakeholders, SMEs and an employee focus group, to ensure everyone understood and agreed to the end result.
This was a complex system, including multiple application types with different information, standards of validation, assurance processes, and final results for each. We knew that just replacing the existing service like-for-like would replicate the existing problems, wo we engaged in a lengthy process of service design to put our learnings to use. This process was tightly entwined with the rest of the design team, and produced extremely useful results:
With a wealth of data to feed our designer brains, we worked collaboratively to produce a comprehensive array of design artefacts:
Designing for a system that included public-facing and employee-facing elements needed a complex and expansive design system. We produced a bespoke Sketch library based on Atomic Design and the GDS, managed by Abstract and accessible by Zeplin. This created an efficient collaboration workflow not only within the design team, but also with the different development departments.
We took multiple steps to validate our discoveries and designs as we progressed, including:
The project had numerous senior stakeholders, including staff team managers, product owners, heads of department, and government ministers, who all needed to be kept up to date with progress. We achieved this through several channels:
After exhaustive research and design cycles, we had solutions that needed building. Fortunately, we had been able to bring the development teams along for much of the design process, including their feedback to reduce the difficulty of the handover. But even tighter collaboration was necessary to get the approved designs built. We needed to make sure that what was delivered was correctly communicated, but also that it would be released in a way that made coherent sense. We did this mainly through:
Our collaboration with the developers didn't end with that, though. We took an active part in development and assurance process:
Nothing was considered completed the first time it was developed. After rolling out each release of new features, testing was performed to capture any unexpected problems. This included:
So, when it was all said and done, what did we achieve?
Here's some quotes from folks who I've had the pleasure of working with over the past few years, so you know I'm not just blowing my own trumpet.
Bobbu's skills and experience combined with their ability to absorb new information quickly and adapt to the environment allowed them to hit the ground running. They didn't shy away from getting stuck in and taking responsibility for complex designs from day 1 despite any challenges, such as lack of access to the client's systems.
Bobbu has also made a positive impact to the project by helping to improve the client's ways of working, such as breaking silos by working closely with the development team.
Drawing on their varied experience, Bobbu has lead requirements gathering for future design deliverables which has been hugely helpful.
- Bobbu's can-do attitude combined with their candid and respectful approach have been a breath of fresh air especially on a demanding project like this (although they would probably say they've had more challenging gigs in the past!)
- Bobbu's breadth and depth of skills and experience has allowed them to contribute to a number of areas on the project (from hands-on digital designs to requirements gathering).
- Bobbu's commitment to deliver high quality work despite tight deadlines and challenges has been evident by the progress made on design deliverables in the short time they have been on the project.
Bobbu has shown amazing respect and collaboration with the team, they are very open and honest in their communication and are extremely professional when they represent BJSS with clients. Bobbu doesn't just take information and process it, they take time to question, challenge; and they use their experience and knowledge to drive creativity.
Their interaction design came to the fore when making this particular product. Judges were impressed by how they built the technical groundwork in the team, and applied this against inconvenient human factors - and by their enthusiasm.
Bobbu is possibly *the most* open, honest, respectful and thoughtful person I've met, in or outside work, in my many years on the planet. A++++++++++++++. Would work with again.
Bobbu is one of the most open people I've worked with and has a high degree of integrity. Bobbu is very honest about their strengths and weaknesses and while this takes courage, it really does allow the team to support each other and work towards common goals.
Bobbu is an asset to a team due to their thoughtful approach to improving working practices and making sure all team members are heard and taking into account when suggesting new ideas.
Bobbu is very proactive with their contribution to the BJSS culture outside of their day-to-day role and this is recognised and appreciated.
Bobbu has received a wide range of positive feedback from clients and peers alike across the themes below:Bobbu has also done very well in:
- Dedication to the role, team and client and acting with integrity
- Technical ability; their experience as a developer means they can seamlessly design and explain requirements to dev teams
- Passion for UX and creativity in delivering solutions but also structuring engaging workshops and group sessions
- Ability to fulfil responsibilities above their role such as Delivery Management, Scrum Mastering and resolving live issues
- Relationship building and client management
- Communicating Ethics in the workplace to a wider BJSS audience
- Upskilling themselves and their peers in GDS and UX prototyping
- The Academy and mentoring
- Meetups and other forums