Project 10-g

Working on Fortius.

Fortius is a cloud-based, SaaS subscription, providing governance, risk management and compliance to the public and private sector, including construction, transport, retail and property management. Joining as a product designer working initially with just the Product Design Director designer to help on the mounting design tasks from the backlog.

TOOLS

DESIGN TEAM

1

Design Head

1-5

Product Designers

1-2

UX Researchers

A thanks to Nik (Head of design) and Len (Product Design Director) who really helped me deeply understand the product and the customer, and in turn become a better designer.

Current Portal

01

SaaS Platform.

A completely new and slightly niche industry to understand and learn. The platform provided verification on data points across all work categories, tenders, and projects. It would enable buyers to access data analytics across their entire supply chain such as the validity and expiration of licenses, qualifications and certificates and accuracy of financial health, along with up-to-date health and safety reports.

Web app

Prototyping

Design system / component libraries

Branding

02

CHALLENGE

Salvaging work done by the previous designers that were no longer working with the company. Being the sole designer and having to hit the ground running to start implementing new features from the backlog working within tight deadlines. Supporting the Product Owner, on ideation, and design, continuously improving and iterating on existing applications, driving innovation when possible, and removing business pain points, increasing client satisfaction and empowering users to focus on activities that directly drive revenue.

03

Collaborate

Working with the agency Inviqa who produced story maps and user scenarios to greatly improve our sign up & subscription management. Their design approach and their visual interpretation resonated with me and the rest of the business, making me re-consider the direction and foundation of our shared UI. My next task would be how we take the learnings and expand this to other areas of the site.

04

Component Library

Using our old-shared UI as a foundation, I attempted to build our new design system, translating patterns, approaches, and behaviours from our existing components. Had the opportunity to start utilising the new component library straight away by redesigning the subscription / account management.

I began to record design patterns on what would one day be a design system style guide. With an increasingly growing team, it would be an essential for new designers to learn and contribute to the design patterns. Once the initial draft of the design system was signed-off and refined by our head of design, we’d go on to promote guidelines and share these best practices, usages, variants and standards with the design and engineer team.

05

Build and test

Day to day had me working on new features and services from concept, ideation and strategy phase with developers, BAs and product owners. Creating user flows, wireframes and prototypes in low or high-fidelity mock-ups, communicating interaction and the rationale behind it. Working closely with developers to challenge feedback and encourage seamless user experiences. However, it was necessary to stay agile, so iterating based on feedback from the business, working through design problems (end-to-end), translating insights into intuitive and optimised solutions.

06

TESTING

Attempting to deliver evidence-based visual design, through analytics, ux research and user testing. Constantly re-iterating after receiving feedback from team and our customers. At early stages of the design process, we were measuring how well the features and new journeys were working via prototype testing. This in turn gave us valuable in-sight, helping us identify potential problems, but also helped validate assumptions and support design decisions.

08

FUTURE ChallengeS

The task now is to continue (when appropriate) in replacing the existing services/ areas of the product with the new design system so that our patterns, style, and behaviour are consistent throughout rather than having our services display two distinct visual styles.

Expansion of the team and new initiatives has allowed us to better identify pain points of the design system. Further contribution, finalisation and agreement with the engineering team on how best to move forward with updates, new components, and general maintenance of the design system will be the next challenge.