Cutover is a work management platform for hugely complex operational resilience, application release orchestration and cloud migration projects. Their clients number some of the biggest financial corporations in the world and the projects, known internally as Runbooks, can number thousands of individual tasks for global mission-critical projects such as ATM network failures. Runbooks often comprise hundreds of members in numerous teams, integrate with external systems and give real-time reporting on the status of the project. It’s immensely complex UX and something which has been highly enjoyable to work on.

Because of client confidentiality I can’t outline the specific projects I worked on here but drop me a line to see my Cutover Case Study.

I joined BoF in April 2017 as Senior UX Designer, in January 2018 I was made Design Director and in June 2019 I changed my role to UX Director. In my time here I have hired 5 members of staff, 3 of which are still with the business, spearheaded the development of the BoF Design System, embraced usability testing, OOUX and other agile techniques, refocused the persona development and shaped the user experience strategy of the product team. My role now is to increase transference and consistency throughout the BoF product portfolio and help steer the company in a more customer led direction. Below are some of the highlight projects I’ve led while working for this truly groundbreaking company.

BoF Design System

The BoF Design System has been a long time coming, the everyday tasks, resource and competing initiatives have thwarted its development but in 2020 it will get its first real rollout to the business. Working with the Studio Team to incorporate the new style-guide work and the development team to implement our new patterns in new development work we will start to see the impact of all the hard work in consolidating and removing inconsistency.

Un-Design

There are a great deal of initiatives that the development team are working on and a full redesign of the site, whilst much needed, is not currently possible. As a interim measure we recently worked on an ‘UnDesign’ of the current homepage and article page. Even though fully paying back technical debt is not possible right now we have slimmed down the homepage, removed underperforming modules and made the homepage shorter based on heat/clickmap data. In up coming stages we will further reduce the elements on the page, swap out expensive and slow loading custom fonts and speed up the page load time. Using Hotjar we will track the performance of this newly slimmed down page and it will give us invaluable data on how our customers use our site in readiness for a full redesign in 2020. You can read about the process here.

BoF Company Pages

BoF Careers offers companies who advertise jobs on our service pages that allow them to not only advertise their jobs but also the company culture. The existing pages were built a long time ago and desperately needed a redesign so they performed better on mobile and gave the companies a better platform to promote themselves. Using OOUX techniques to identify the components we worked mobile first and created use cases, personas and wireframes. Particular attention was given to the edit flow which needed to be simple but sophisticated. The old pages were difficult to edit which meant that companies rarely came back to update their information, the new flow was simple and easy and has increased updating enormously.

BoF iOS App

The BoF iOS app is a member only exclusive but was built on web app technology. Poorly thought-out UX and slow performance always stunted it adoption. Last year we started working on a truly native solution that not only improved performance and brought the style of the app upon to date incorporating some new typography ideas and article presentation. Eventually members will be able to manage their job applications, continue any Education courses they have subscribed to and take full advantage of their subscription from within the app.

Building a team

When I joined BoF there was a Junior Designer and a Print Designer on the team. Soon after I joined the Junior Designer left to go back to school and I was working on the UX and marketing assets alone. Over the next two years it was one of my main tasks to build out a fully fledged design team and when I was made Design Director I put my full focus into the task. Over the period of two years I hired an Intern, two UX Designers, a Mid Weight Marketing Designer and an Art Director. In July 2019 we hived off the visual design part of the team and formed an in-house Studio which allowed all of the creative staff such as podcast, video and copywriting to work closer together. Myself and a UX Designer formed the UX Department and now I can focus purely on the user experience of the product, a full two and a half years after joining the business.

UX Strategy

Like most businesses BoF has limited resources and prioritising UX research, proper product ideation and testing is always a challenge. Over the past year I have been proactive in working with the different departments around the business to promote and communicate good UX processes. I work closely with the Head of Product, CTO and product managers to effectively pipeline the correct amount of time that is needed for the most important projects and streamline the UX process for the projects which need to be delivered as quickly as possible. In essence, it’s all about looking forward, identifying the direction of the different areas of business and being ready to give the most value to any development the business does. The design system has been instrumental in this process but good old fashioned communication, listening and joining up the dots makes this seamless. I make it my mission to regularly talk to all the heads of departments and find out what future plans they have inked or simply just thinking about and find crossover and build in duel purpose concepts that save the business time in the long run.

I moved to Edinburgh to work for startup FreeAgent who create online accounting software that had rabidly passionate customers who pushed their NPS score up in the 60’s.

I  created a campaign to promote Freeagent to accountants to start using the software with their customers, saving them time and allowing them to do what did best, advising their clients on how to best structure their accounts rather than adding up receipts.

We created a new sub-brand of FreeAgent, advertisements, event stands and other promotional material.

June 2015

UX Contract

Tools Used:
Axure, Skype

Techniques Used:
Stakholder Interviews, Persona Creation, Empathy Maps, Use Cases & Flows, Axure Prototypes

July 2006
Web Designer

Tools Used:
Adobe Suite

Techniques Used:
Stakeholder Interviews, Wireframing, HTML Coding