With 10+ years experience, I’ve worked on a range of projects across the automotive, financial services, education construction, energy, retail, assisted living and hospitality sectors. Here you’ll find a select few examples of projects I've had the pleasure of working on.
I’m a designer who approaches problem solving by making sense of the intersection between people, technology and business.
Intrigued by the ways in which culture manifests itself in human behaviour, I love delving into the essence of what resonates with people. I translate these insights into meaningful solutions that are engaging, whilst balancing technical and business considerations.
When originally launched, the Volkswagen UK website was fit-for-purpose. Yet through continual releases and hot fixes, it eventually evolved into a cumbersome beast of a CMS which was painful to use and maintain. With a CMS migration planned, it was the perfect opportunity to relook at the UX of the website and make sure we were putting experience first, improving both UX for the customer as well as content authors.
UX lead within a multidisciplinary team of tech and design. The project kicked off with a 6-week discovery phase, followed by 3-week delivery sprint cadences over the course of 2 years.
Responsibilities included heuristic evaluation, UX audit, competitor analysis, requirements gathering, functional specs, responsive wireframes, UI design, workshop facilitation.
Three overarching principles guided our thinking, shaped our direction and gave us a solid foundation in which we could base design decisions.
Legacy code decreased site performance and made new releases laborious to push live. We removed this dead weight and built a new CMS where all components and templates had a clear purpose.
For users, the car buying journey triggers both emotional and rational feelings. We validated design decisions through experience principles ingrained within these two mental-models.
It was crucial to design two-fold, keeping content authors in mind when designing. Our goal was to also improve the UX 'under-the-hood' to make page creation and authoring easier.
To uncover existing customer painpoints, I undertook several tasks to understand the current landscape of the industry and where Volkswagen sat within the industry.
The UX audit was a crucial task that provided the baseline to creating a standardised, modular template and component library. I developed a clear perspective on predominant content types and what would be needed to successfully migrate all static and editorial content on site. The audit involved documenting every template and component (including variations) that existed on the site, outlining the purpose, attributes, functionality and content management dependencies.
This is just one example of how many variations of components a website can collect over an extended period of time, I documented at least 6 different variations of expanded containers. Granted, the purpose of these expanded content containers may differ from variation to variation, but having this holistic perspective on existing variations was invaluable to creating a consolidated set of templates and components.
To validate the UX approach to the CMS migration, I used usability heuristics principles to assess the current state of the whole Volkswagen.co.uk site. Through this analysis, it became evident that there was a lot of opportunity to improve the website, particularly to improve ease of gathering information from a user's perspective.
Through the UX audit, heuristic evaluation, and competitor analysis, I synthesised these observations into actionable insights which identified key opportunities for improvement, and helped prioritise enhancements that would have greater impact on the overall user experience.
Navigation elements are inconsistent, links are cluttered and not contextually relevant, taxonomy is ambiguous.
Lack of consistency and over complicated visual treatments of components, and their affordances.
Error states are unclear visually, semantically, or at times, non-existent. Does little to build brand confidence.
Functionality (e.g. search, filter functionality) can be over engineered, adding friction to the experience.
Differing brand style guides co-existing on the website reduces perceived sense of quality, trust, and professionalism
Content on page should be more engaging, with a clearer focus on the purpose of the page.
In order to understand the issues Volkswagen had with the current website, we ran stakeholder workshops to walk through the current experience, challenges and the client's goals.
These sessions were crucial in scoping out complex, API-driven tools such as Online Service Booking, laden with legacy code and functionality accumulated over the years. We collaborated together to set new objectives, benchmarks, and KPIs to inform our strategy moving forward, meeting both business and user needs.
I worked closely with the content strategist to define an initial pass at a consolidated set of templates and components that would work well to achieve the content migration plan the content strategist was producing. We used three key criteria to decide what we should keep, remove or consolidate as well as provided rationale for any newly created components.
Is the component fit for purpose? Does it work to achieve its task?
Does the component adhere to the visual language and style guide of the new site?
Are there multiple components which achieve the same thing?
Iterations of sketches, lists and card sorting gave us the means to whittle down 20+ templates to 10 and 150+ components down to 38. Working in agile, we knew that this initial list as most likely to change, but it was used as a basis to plan out each sprint.
Once within the delivery sprints, I created robust documentation to outline responsive template and component functionality, which mapped to content migration matrix produced by the content strategist.
This included detailed annotations outlining the purpose of the template, content areas to assist content authors in structuring page content, as well as defining which components could be used within each content area.
Template specs were created for both static and API-driven page, adjusting the level of authoring flexibility based on the purpose and technical dependencies of each template.
This included detailed annotations outlining the functionality of each element within each component variation, as well as documenting functionality differences across desktop, tablet and mobile breakpoints
They serviced two needs - to assist developers in building and implementing components in the CMS platform, and to provide guidance to content authors on how best to use the components.
Focusing on clean fonts, lines and colours, whilst adhering to AA accessibility, I supported the lead UI designer in mocking up screens, aligning the template and components to the newly refreshed digital style guide, ensuring consistency and usability. It was then implemented into Jahia, the chosen CMS platform.
The result was a modular toolkit that consisted of a standardised set of templates and components that would allow content authors to create pages quickly and efficiently whilst maintaining a consistent design patterns and throughout wv.co.uk. It would also be used as a baseline design system which would evolve as future Volkswagen projects were undertaken.
This was by far the longest project I have worked on. Clocking in at almost 2 years, there were so many moving parts, particularly at the beginning of the project. This put a huge strain on both myself and the content strategist to deliver on time as we were earlier in the development cycle, however we managed to pull through successfully.
What made this project a lot easier however was how close knit the team was. Regardless of the discipline we specialised in, all of us got along really well, which made the project very cohesive. I really understood the value of getting along with your team in a high-pressure project such as this one.
