UX PROJECT HISTORY

UX and Shopify Designer, Vibrant Activewear 
May 2023 – December 2023 | E-Commerce

The project was to build a Shopify based eCommerce website focussing on a gym wear for women.
MY ROLE AND APPROACH
I helped with the shop build and was responsible for UX and UI design, and Shopify integration. I also worked with the offshore developers to implement frontend changes and bug-fixes.
Stakeholder engagement: I worked with the founders to gather requirements and then involved them in each step of the process so ensure they understand the design decisions made and the supporting research that I’d conducted. 
Research: In my research, I included competitive audit of fashion websites like Sweaty Betty, Gymshark and ASOS and I studied white papers and best practices from Amazon and Flipkart. Based on my research I observed that product discovery, navigation and checkout were the three main areas of focus for the MVP.  
Design: I implemented measures to deliver a clear and simple user experience across the above-mentioned areas. As an example, in terms of Product discovery:
•    I made sure that each product category had a clear representation on the homepage and at least 3 products from each product type were shown to the user
•    I made the product names descriptive and included in them the product colour, style and unique features
•    To inspire users, I included “look books” on the homepage showing pictures of models wearing multiple Vibrant Activewear products. The users can click on any product in the picture to see more information or add it directly to cart
•    To promote upsell, I used product discovery devices like the “products you may like”, “related products” and “category explorer” across the website

Here is an example of working with the founders to meet a business need while still looking after the user. As Vibrant Activewear was a small startup, they wanted to avoid giving users reasons to initiate returns and ask for refunds. To achieve this:
•    Research showed that gym wear is a lifestyle product and that users naturally wanted their gym wear to be durable and withstand intense training, but also be comfortable enough to lounge in. These qualities came through in product details like information of the materials/fabric used, which I made sure was included on product pages
•    I placed a clearly visible size chart on the product page to help users make an informed choice
•    I added product shots which included flat lay/ tabletop pictures of the product as well as model shots. I also made clear what size product the model was wearing to help users make an inspired and an informed choice
•    In the refund policy, I added wording to appeal to the users to help reduce returns unless the product had a physical defect or arrived damaged and communicated that their support was appreciated through this growth phase of the company.
Work samples: Vibrant Activewear Hi Fi UX Designs
Lead UX Designer at Solirius/ EY
October 2022 – April 2023 | Government
Worked on two separate digital transformation initiatives for DWP’s Money and Pensions Scheme. The ask was to design the MVP for websites for the “Money Guiders Programme” and the “UK Partnership B2B hub”. 
•    The money guiders programme is set up to upskill public servants such as local council employees, carers, and other health service workers to provide money guidance to their customers in multiple areas of financial concern

•    The UK Partnership B2B hub’s purpose is to empower and educate employers in carrying out initiatives in their organisation to understand the financial concerns of their staff and help them navigate those concerns through education, planning and by introducing behaviour change. 
MY ROLE AND APPROACH
Stakeholder engagement and research:
•    I led workshops with internal stakeholders, subject matter experts and external users from charities such as Macmillan Cancer Research and Neighbourhood Networks, as well as private organisation like Premiere Inn and Danske Bank across both projects. 

•    Due to tax and legislative differences as well as vast behavioural differences between users from different nations, I interviewed at least one research subject and SME from each nation within the UK i.e. England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.

•    I leaned heavily on external users as well as internal stakeholders to:
o    validate previously created user personas and create new ones
o    identify user needs and pain points in detail

Design:
•    I workshopped designs based on research and ranked user priorities on the designs with the afore mentioned participants

•    I then iteratively produced interactive wireframes for user testing

•    I helped in carving out an MVP based on the top user priorities 

User Testing:
•    Led user testing to evolve the MVP wireframes over multiple rounds of lab testing sessions with approx. 8 users per project from group of users I’d engaged for the initial research.
Through Sapient, I worked for HSBC, for whom I designed a data analytics platform providing observability over their 30,000 APIs.
Every transaction that an HSBC customer performs is handled by an API. For e.g. balance check, money transfer and cash withdrawal are all transactions and there is an API to individually handle each of them. One of the main functions of this dashboard is to allow senior management to see how the API estate is performing, and act accordingly should they see a red flag against an individual API or a group of them. For example, around the 1st of every month the balance check and funds transfer APIs get overloaded and are in the danger of failing. Should such an incident occur, the dashboard reports it for remedial action. The dashboard is also meant to report endangered APIs well before their failure for the necessary preventative action. The application does not just stop there it does more. In essence it provides an at-a-glance view of the technology estate and intends to do three main things: 
1.    allow the users to gain insights about the health of HSBC’s API estate and make informed decisions based on the same
2.    allow the user to troubleshoot by showing them where the fires might be and investigate them further
3.    draw predictions on how the bank’s technology infrastructure might look like in the future
•    I worked closely with the product managers, business analysts and other internal stakeholders to gather requirements, establish KPIs and co-design the final prototype as well as the supporting design system. 
Research and design:
•    Due to the technical nature of the project, I interviewed subject matter experts who were also end users within the bank to understand requirements, validate assumptions and build clear user personas. I also involved them in design workshops to provide contextual insights and to make them a part of the solution.
•    I delivered the fully spec-ed out UI designs.
Developer Collaboration:
•    Supported the Front-End Developers though regular desk checks to ensure an accurate implementation of the designs and design behaviour in areas such as responsiveness and cross browser compatibility.
Product Designer at Natwest Bank
January 2022 – March 2022 | Retail Banking
Project details: I worked with Natwest’s e-Banking migration team to help upgrade their online banking experience. The projects that I delivered included “credit card payments” and “customising e-banking alerts”.
MY ROLE AND APPROACH
Stakeholder engagement, research and design:
•    I worked with the product manager to gather requirements and built initial scamps
•    I then presented the scamps in design workshops to various stakeholders within the bank including the project director and members from legal (for compliance) and engineering team member like developers and solutions architects to solicit their input and enhance the journeys that I’d designed.
•    Once the scamps had evolved enough, I built prototypes in Axure for testing and then iteratively evolved them through user feedback
•    I presented the designs at various show and tell sessions within the bank for input from cross departmental stakeholders for design consistency
•    Delivered the final UI for the project
UX Designer at Harborough District Council 
June 2021 – Jan 2022 | Government
Worked on Harborough District Council’s website migration project. The council was moving from their existing CMS/ CRM system called Lagan to a new one called Netcall. 
MY ROLE AND APPROACH
Working with GDS guidelines, 
•    I helped the council design various transactional, functional and content areas of the website including:
o    Council Tax
o    Waste Management
o    Planning
o    Licensing
o    Website login and registration
•    I served as a full lifecycle designer - taking each requirement from discovery to delivering fully tested prototypes.
Stakeholder engagement: Ran workshops with various service area managers, customer services personnel, content writers and other stakeholders to:
•    conduct research
•    workshop user journeys 
•    produce wireframes and content architectures
Research: In absence of actual users to work with due to the COVID restrictions, I relied on Google analytics, call centre data and customer services reports as well as qualitative feedback from customer service personnel to make design decisions.
Design: I produced content architectures, journey maps and lo-fi UX designs. Netcall has their own UI components library and hence the was no need for UI designs however the UX designs had to be developed in adherence to Netcall’s specifications.
Developer collaboration and design implementation: Served as a bridge between the council service heads and Netcall to communicate the synthesised requirements and I worked with Netcall engineers in implementing the UX designs into their CMS.
UX Designer at Natwest Bank 
Jan 2021 – June 2021 | Retail Banking
Worked on Natwest’s contactless joint savings account opening journey. This project took place during COVID and therefore the journey had to be fully contactless. The main challenges were:
1.    Notifying the 2nd applicant that the 1st one had successfully done their part and now it was their turn.
2.    Notifying the 1st applicant that the 2nd applicant has successfully completed their part, and the account was now open.
3.    Sending periodic reminders to the appropriate applicant to resume their incomplete journey.
4.    Notifying the applicants of the deletion of their incomplete application after they had abandoned it for over two weeks.
5.    And most importantly, doing all the above without sharing their personal data with each other. 

MY ROLE AND APPROACH
In summary, I took the journey maps over from the journey designer and translated them into usable interactions that satisfied user’s MVP priorities from the product. 
Stakeholder management, research, design, testing and developer collaboration:
•    Evolved the interaction designs with input from various stakeholders in the bank’s savings team, their legal team for compliance, and technical architects and developers etc.
•    Ran the designs through peer review sessions with other senior UX designers within the bank to ensure design consistency
•    Validated designs through user testing conducted with user pairs and further evolved designs as necessary
•    I worked closely with developers in implementing designs through regular desk check
•    I was also involved in mentoring Junior UX designers from other teams
UX and UI Designer, RS Components
January 2020 to May 2020 | Manufacturing
This project was an Industrial IoT based data analytics platform for factory managers to foresee potential hazards, and to stay on top of their maintenance schedules and make factories safer. RS components makes sensors that get fitted on various machines on a factory floor. These sensors are configured to measure indicators like heat, vibration, RPM and noise. The sensors then live streams the measured data to the cloud. The app has access to these measurements so that it can:
•    display real time indication of the health of the machines
•    draw trends and forecast potential issues that may cause disruptions or hazards

MY ROLE AND APPROACH
Stakeholder management, research, design and developer collaboration:
•    Worked with the product owner and business analyst to understand requirement
•    I conducted research by interviewing the product manager and the business analyst who were also the project SMEs.
•    I designed the prototypes and worked with the engineering team to run technical feasibility on them and iterated the designs as necessary
•    Produced the necessary UI designs and worked with developers to implement them
UX Designer, Paddy Power Betfair
April 2019 to September 2019 | Online Gambling
Working in a strict agile process, my role here was to help Betfair with their mobile app experience. I helped them:
1.    completely redesign their mobile home page
2.    improve customer onboarding experience by building in interactive instructions enabling users to place their first be
3.    Improve awareness of live promotions by highlighting them on homepage
MY ROLE AND APPROACH
Stakeholder management, research, design, testing and developer collaboration:
•    I worked with the product owners to understand requirements
•    Conducted research by interviewing the product managers who were also subject matter experts
•    Designed prototypes using Axure. Worked with the research team to get them tested via lab testing and usertesting.com. Iterated the designs based on findings from the test results
•    Used the research data to further evolve and produce detailed UX designs and handed them over to the UI design team
•    Worked with the development and research team to test out functionality by making it live to a small percentage of users
Lead UX Designer, Byhiras, London
January 2019 to April 2019 | Fintech
Byhiras is a start-up and a fund management product with clients like the Greater Manchester Pension Fund.  It is a platform that if you were a fund manager you could use to track how your investments were fairing. The platform does so by helping the fund manager understand where their investments were making money – in which geographies, currencies, seasonality, commodities or instruments and so on. And where they weren’t. This way the fund manager could observe trends, build up investing patterns and use only the ones that were working for them. Amongst other things the platform also allows fund managers to see the costs that they were paying to external suppliers for functions the fund did not have in-house, and how these costs compared to what the rest of the industry was paying.
MY ROLE AND APPROACH
Stakeholder management, research, design and developer collaboration:
•    I worked with the founder, business analyst and quantitative analyst to understand the requirements, as well as the wider product roadmap
•    These stakeholders served as my client and product managers, SMEs and user representatives. I conducted qualitative research by interviewing them and workshopped solutions with them
•    I designed the prototypes and worked with the wider engineering team to run technical feasibility on them and iterated the designs as necessary
•    Produced the necessary UI designs and worked with developers to implement them
UX Researcher, LiveAreaCX, London 
October 2018 to December 2018 | E-Commerce
La Prairie is a luxury cosmetic brand. The project was to design their global eCommerce website. Part of the work required was an on-the-ground research piece to understand the shift in La Prairie’s customer demographics and the resulting behaviour.
MY ROLE AND APPROACH
User research:
My main task was to visit the La Prairie showrooms in London and interview their business managers and sales staff. This was to gain an understanding of the brand and challenge the way the business saw the brand versus how the evolved customer base saw La Prairie. 
In summary, my findings were that La Prairie customer base had shifted over the years from a European demographic to one that was more Asian and Middle Eastern. Other key differences were that new customer base was also much younger, and gifting, for example, had emerged as a substantial new reason for purchase. 
The interviews focussed on understanding how this newer and younger customer interacted with the brand and their products, and what their behaviour, purchase patterns, seasonality and demands were from La Prairie. Based on my research findings I wrote a research report and shared it with the client. 
Project details: NEX is one of the few companies in the world that specialises in post trade processing - it is the activity that happens once two traders have locked in a trade with each other.  Essentially a pipeline is opened between the two parties and legal contracts are exchanged and signed to confirm and legitimise the trade. These contracts are based on a set of trading rules. I helped NEX design the document management system to generate the necessary contracts. I also helped them build the rules engine that sits at the heart of it.
MY ROLE AND APPROACH
Stakeholder management, research, design and developer collaboration:
•    I worked with the product manager and product director. They served as my client, SMEs and user representatives. I understood the technical intricacies of the project from them, interviewed them for research and workshopped initial scamps with them.
•    The scamps I designed were further developed by conducting virtual workshops with other business stakeholder and SMEs from NEX’s New York office and their engineering team in Tel Aviv. The challenge here was that between London, Tel Aviv and New York there is only one hour overlap of work hours between the three offices. Here my approach of developing scamps beforehand served well given the scantity of time. I used the scamps to expedite conversations and got the validation I needed from the concerned parties 
•    The result was wireframes for the end-to-end journey as well as detailed click-by-click interaction design system.
UX Designer, KHWS
March 2018 – April 2018 | Oil and Gas
Project details: Helped KHWS design the Exxon Mobil car service booking app and Exxon Mobile “Places of Power” campaign microsite for the Russian market.
MY ROLE AND APPROACH
Research and design:
•    I worked with the account manager to understand the project brie
•    I used the material provided by the agency as well as had some facetime with the end client to conduct research
•    I produced the wireframes and collaborated with the agency’s creative team to make sure that the designs were on brief and in-line with their “Big Idea”
Noetic was a start-up in the hospitality space. The project was to design a hotel reservation app. The internal reservationists at a hotel would use this app to help the customer make a reservation while understanding their requirement over the phone with them. This therefore needed to be a comprehensive yet simple tool that would help the reservationist systematically enter the requirement provided by the customer such as:
•    reservation dates 
•    nature of the room 
•    special requirements like chocolate and flowers in the room 
•    on-site restaurant reservations
Based on this information, the reservationist could then: 
•    find the best matching room at the lowest rates 
•    take payment 
•    book the itinerary and
•    email booking confirmation to the customer
The app also had to be simple enough to:
•    help the reservationist go through the whole process quickly to avoid long wait times on their phone lines
•    have a flatter learning curve for trainee reservationists so that they were up and running in days as opposed to the weeks that they needed with the incumbent booking system
MY ROLE AND APPROACH
Stakeholder management, research, design and developer collaboration:
•    I worked with the founder, the business analyst, and the head reservationist at the client hotel who was the end user and the subject matter expert on the team.
•    After receiving initial brief from the business analyst and the project manager, my first port of call was to audit the incumbent system – Oracle Opera - to study how it mapped out key user journeys, where it succeeded, and its failures
•    Along with the user representative, I broke the brief down into individual scenarios, enriched them with realistic details and mapped out user personas and user journey
•    I then involved the individuals mentioned above along with the engineering team to workshop the initial scamps and evolved them iteratively to produce UX designs for the MVP.
•    I onboarded front-end developers and handed the designs over to them through Zeplin

Case study: Noetic Hotel Central Reservation System
UX Designer, Islington Council, London
March 2016 –October 2017 | Government
Project details: London Borough of Islington was undergoing a complete online transformation. Their website Islington.gov.uk was being migrated from Microsoft SharePoint to Sitecore and needed Interaction designers to help re-engineer several areas of their website.
MY ROLE AND APPROACH
•    Helped Islington council design their new website from the ground up. Working with the GDS guidelines, helped the council re-engineer several transactional, functional and content areas of the website including 
o    Council Tax Registration
o    Waste Management 
o    Adult Social Care and Health
•    I served as a full lifecycle Interaction designer - taking requirements from discovery to delivering fully tested prototypes. 
Stakeholder management:
•    The process started with understanding the requirement from the business analyst
•    I then worked with council service heads to evolve my understanding of their department and the requirement at hand, set KPIs and manage their expectations
Research:
•    I conducted qualitative research by interviewing internal stakeholders like department heads, social workers and other relevant members of the council. I aligned closely especially with social workers in areas such as Adult Social Care where meeting the end user was not allowed as they were deemed vulnerable
•    I carried out quantitative research included analysing the website’s google analytics data with the BAU team and working with Islington’s call centres to acquire and analyse demand over council’s phone lines
•    I ran ethnographic research wherever possible and attended council organised meetings especially with groups of residents who were disabled to deepen my understanding of their needs
Design and testing:
•    I produced HTML prototypes using a GDS toolkit like framework and evolved them iteratively
•    I conducted guerrilla research with users at Islington council’s customer centre to validate designs and then evolved them iteratively
•    I ran the prototypes through peer review and show and tell sessions to get further consensus
Developer Collaboration and design implementation:
I worked closely with developers and solutions architects first while designing prototypes and subsequently when getting the designs implemented. One particular area of challenge was finding ways around the council’s older technical infrastructure.
Case Studies: Islington Council Digital Transformation
Worked for Unilever through Hodes which was their brand agency at the time. Unilever wanted to redesign their global careers portal. The technical challenge was to do this within the confines of their CMS and reuse as many UI assets from their development library as possible while still addressing user needs.
MY ROLE AND APPROACH
The key to success here was understanding the user. Unilever is one of the largest employers in the world and offered employment opportunities to a wide array of people from diverse backgrounds.
Research:
•    I conducted user research through interviews firstly with Unilever HR and then with end users
•    To validate my findings and to gain further insight, I conducted competitive analysis of the career sites of Shell, Proctor and Gamble, Johnson and Johnson and Nestle to understand their approach to recruitment and HR branding, and to investigate where they were succeeding
•    I also brought into play my experience of designing the career portal for Nestle Middle East
•    I observed that level of seniority was the most consistent way of grouping the users and building user categories. 
•    Based on these user groups, I then built detailed user personas and identified user pain points.
•    Understanding the user on a granular level allowed me to innovate freely within the confines of Unilever’s technical restraints. 
Design:
•    Based on my research, I then built the user journeys and website architecture, and the final wireframes in congruence with the CMS specs provided by Unilever engineers
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