After one year of hard work and extensive testing, it was great to finally see my work come to fruition. Today, the team and I presented our re-designed iSite product to 60+ BBC stakeholders.

Sometimes when you start a new project that has been on the cards for a while it is difficult to know where to start. Lots of upfront talk and the slow build of expectation and when you finally get around to looking at it in depth you simply can not find an ideal starting place.

Over my career, I have come across hundreds of guidelines. In fact, I have written a fair few of them myself- both for the web and for print. They are a great way of setting down standards and best practices. Although, I have seen some really well written and researched guidelines come to absolutely nothing due to its timing and execution. Recently, I was entered into a debate about style guides.

At this year’s UX Cambridge, the one big ‘take away‘ topic for me was the idea of Lean UX. Wonderfully presented Jeff Gothelf, the talk centred around the idea of a lean (based on the Lean Production / Just In Time practice originally developed by Toyota) approach to design and development.

A large part of the modern design process involves validating design decisions with members of your target audience (if you’re doing it right). Sometimes we able to do this simply and cheaply on paper prototypes where we are navigating from one printed sheet to another.

Today, I attended the BBC’s version of ‘UX Factor’ held at Facebook’s London office. A workshop to help the BBC find the next great idea to help serve our audience. If you remember, it has been some time since the iPlayer first came around and although we have an amazing Radio app now…

Very sad to be leaving my role as UX / UI Designer at Johnston Press, I have a little over a week to go. It’s very tough in life to find a work place where you get on with everyone and feel the next few years will see JP produce some very exciting digital products. Truly wish them well and hope to keep in touch.

I’m really partial to a set of guidelines. I think guidelines provide a simple set of rules and best practice theories that aid both experts and novices in any particular task. Through a long process of trial and error, guidelines provide tangible evidence of where we have been and what we have learnt.

Maybe a really silly blog name or maybe a really clever one, I don’t know. But feel I need to get something out in the open, a rant I suppose. A few years ago someone showed me the most horrid, bandwidth blood sucking, garish, pointless and stupid flash website and asked me that is what a good designer does- what do you do? Yes, all the individual elements to the site were well drawn and crafted in PhotoShop, and the background video cleverly put together in sequence to the animated 3D characters. But this wasn’t design, this was art (and definitely not to my taste).

I feel very honoured to say I truly love the work I do. As odd as it sounds, I like nothing more than wireframes, usability testing, visual design and just talking to people who use the products I design. Although, I feel it is really important when you are wireframing, designing or just plotting user flow around a site or app that you truly believe in your product.