As user experience specialist my role is to ensure that the user experience is maintained and preferably enhanced as content and services that currently sit on separate websites are brought together as part of a unified web project. Specifically I am leading on the design of a global experience language that will govern the whole of the Jisc web presence, creating a unified and consistent user experience and customer offer.
I work closely with the sector intelligence team, leading on primary research activities around the Jisc web presence. And support the digital content and UX manager on content strategy, content design and wider UX strategy.
I am responsible for designing information architectures, user interfaces, atmospheres, page templates and functionality that meets user and business needs and are simple and a delight to use. Creating customer journeys, user stories, sketches, sitemaps, wireframes and rapid development of clickable prototypes to visualise design concepts.
“A design system can create value on at least two levels. At the team level, it can create a more streamlined, predictable process that reduces design and engineering time. At the UX level it helps deliver consistency and predictability in the interface, and to raise the quality of the experience overall when designers and engineers […]
Sticky notes are an essential piece of kit for any UX practitioner, but sometimes we can miss the simple things that are right in front of us. At a customer experience mapping workshop last year Stavros Garzonis blew my mind, showing us how we’d been peeling off sticky notes the wrong way (keep reading to […]
As a small, agile, multi skilled and geographically dispersed team that works on multiple products, building a shared understanding of needs and priorities for our work is key. Furthermore building empathy with our users empowers us to be better designers. “In the end, design is all about empathy. This is what leads to creativity, inspiration […]
“Day by day, the number of devices, platforms, and browsers that need to work with your site grows. Responsive web design represents a fundamental shift in how we’ll build websites for the decade to come.”- Jeffrey Veen What is responsive web design? RWD is a web design technique aimed at creating sites that provide a […]
Ever heard comments that have gone something like… “The sort of tasks that users are performing are too complicated for mobile” “Analytics show our primary audience is desktop” “Users only want a desktop site” When desktop use vastly outweighs mobile it seems obvious to prioritise that as the primary medium. And following a strategy that […]
Following on from my previous post on taking a framework agnostic approach to documenting UI patterns I wanted to talk about creating a pattern index as a counterpart to a pattern library, or as a useful tool for anyone designing within a large web estate. The spark As with many things, an innocuous looking question […]
From the very beginning of the Jisc user experience and design project we knew that we didn’t want our pattern library to be just another framework. Bootstrap is widely used across our business and it’s fantastic for rapid development, but by its very nature it’s completely open to individuals interpretation of how to apply it. […]
Following on from my previous post I wanted to explain the logic for the change of name on the project formally known as global experience language. In CX partners initial assessment of our web estate they recommended that “Service mode sites should be made to feel consistent with other Jisc services using modules from […]
First up let me introduce myself as I’m new here. I’m Benjamin (not to be confused with Ben) and I have joined the team on secondment as user experience (UX) specialist. The main challenge in my new role is to lead on the creation of a global experience language (GEL) for Jisc – so that’s […]
