Working with dentsu.

Joining this global digital marketing network, who unlock new opportunities for business transformation and growth for their partners / brands, across their entire customer journey. Working within the product team as a UI designer to help develop and maintain components that make up a suite of apps that benefits everyday users.

TOOLS
DESIGN TEAM

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1

Design Lead

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2-3

UI Designers

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7-9

UX Designers

The current Ecosystem

01

Working on the Media Ecosystem.

The system is a group of cloud-based applications, managing the end-to-end media planning and buying lifecycle for clients. The product team has continuously been improving and iterating the applications, driving innovation and removing the business pain points and increasing client satisfaction, empowering users to focus on activities that directly drive revenue.

Web apps

Documentation

Design system / component library

Data Visualisation

02

Begin

I’ve normally joined design teams to help develop a design system from the ground up, so it was interesting to experience the inverse, and maintain a product with a large fully mature design system and understand it’s challenges.

 

Expansion of the team allowed us to better identify pain points of the design system, and where large enhancements to the core visual design components can be implemented.

03

SPECIALISE

I assisted 2 other senior visual designers, splitting our workload and specialising in certain areas. My main task was to look at how clients interpret data through chart visualisation and attempt to improve components, empowering the designers to tell more compelling stories on their dashboards and pages.

This first consisted of expanding our current colour palette to cover data visualisation. Creating a series of palette types, analysing different harmonies based on core brand colours, colour relationships / neutrality and avoidance of RAG status. Also looking at the order of colours, colour-blind-safe, harmonising and consistency with the rest of the elements on the page.

04

DATA VISUALISATION

The major piece of work became analysing the react chart components for flexibility and customisable options. Researching, benchmarking and analysing the popular / leading websites on data visualisation patterns and uncovering the best practices.

Collaborating with developers, questioning and attempting to better make the chart library to achieve compelling visualisations that easily indicate trends and goals. Integrating the Ecosystem’s brand / visual style so charts appear consistent with the other components.

05

Component Library

Working in such a large team of designers and desiring consistency throughout the end-to-end journey, meant creation of complex yet flexible sketch components / templates.

Robust enough for designers to pick and choose the content, whilst also providing guardrails for the types of content we'll want to limit or prevent designers from using.

06

Guidance

Whilst design was taking place, it was necessary to record design patterns into what would one day be a design system style guide. With a growing team, it would be an ideal for new starters to learn our complex design patterns via guidance pages. Once a component was completed, we’d go on to promote guidelines and share these best practices, usages, variants and standards with the rest of the design team.

08

WORKFLOW

Attempting to deliver evidence-based visual design, through data, research, observation, and insight. Constantly re-iterating after receiving constructive feedback from head of experience and product design. Communicating interaction and design ideas visually and the rationale behind it. Promoting visual storytelling and specification documentation and guidelines when necessary.

Communicating ideas, and solutions to dev, UX teams and stakeholders and advocating for component library best practices through component walkthroughs.

Dentsu.

One of the largest multinational advertising agencies providing media and digital marketing communications and solutions.