UX designer
Head of UX
Year
2016
My Role
-
- UX Designer
Disciplines
- User Experience
- Product Design
- Strategy
- Interaction design
Product design and delivery for new b2b publishing platform
CRU provides market analysis, management consultancy and events for the commodities sector. They produce high quality research and offer prices advice in the metals, mining and fertilizer industries to clients all over the world.
Delivering and supporting their customer with their publishing platform which provides rich market data and analysis online.
CRU wanted a new publishing platform as part of a rethink of the company’s business model for digital products. which involved a complete redesign of the UX of the publishing website and Editorial experience of the analysts and researchers who produce the analysis and reports under CRU’s services.
The Process
What I did
Mapping the experience of the customer Journey
End to end service
The aim of journey mapping is to understand and address the customers’ needs and pain points experienced across all channels of the service while supporting strategic business goals. I co-facilitated a series of workshops with Senior stakeholders to map the process out and then use data visualisation to produce the map itself.
It was identified that the introduction of a semantic tier would enhance both the end-user experience of the platform and assist with the internal processes that drive it.
The UX team surveyed CRU’s metadata and created a standards-based taxonomy to map the business domain. This was then imported into a taxonomy management tool and integrated as part of the Powertagging solution that enables editors to easily and consistently classify content and in doing so enrich the discovery opportunities for users.
In order to improve the overall customer experience of CRU’s online services, we conducted a number of co-design workshops with stakeholders to get ideas and sketches.
Over the course of the project, the prototype evolved from a communication tool pitched into board meetings into a fully detailed documentation channel used by the development team during the software architecture and building phases.
Co-design with stakeholders
Using the prototype as wireframes
I also designed the editorial experience of the analysts and researchers, who produce the analysis and reports offered under CRU’s services. Below are the wireframes from the prototype made on UXpin for the editor UI.
Design system
The concept of a pattern library was introduced once a new visual style. It was important to provide a consistent look and feel with the data and content to give an emphasis in legibility and usability. Working with the visual designer and front-end developer, the new CRU pattern library offered a scalable way to address this by providing the building blocks to quickly build these complex interactions including typography, layout, UI components, colour palette and iconography.
Fully detailed documentation and wireframes, which were used by the development team during the software architecture and building phases.
