What is the best piece of advice anyone has given you in your career?

Early in my career, my fellow Digital Designers and I were an enthusiastic bunch (and still are!). Coming from diverse paths — university degrees, self-taught, and bootcamps — we were united by a mission: to be advocates for the ‘user’. In those days, Adobe XD was our go-to for bringing to life what we envisioned as the most compelling designs for the ‘user’. We’d enthusiastically dive into projects, follow the double-diamond process, and proudly deliver a polished UI. Yet, time and again, the final decision-makers would step in and reshape our carefully crafted work.

Why does this happen? The truth I believe is that the interface isn’t yours. The team owns the interface, and the business owns it and approves it. You need to jump on the business strategy train, or you will be left behind.

One of my mentors essentially told me to ‘listen more than you speak’ and seek to understand the lay of the land. Then, build for the people using the interface and people who commissioned the project. Understand the user and business needs. Being overly keen and pushing for the user is all great but then you’re creating a recipe to overshadow the business goals of the project.

So, do those slightly odd things: suss out the stakeholders, map them, have those chats, and put on your researcher hat to grab their requirements. Keep everyone in the loop and updated. That way, you’re way more likely to nail a well-rounded UI that doesn’t end up in revision limbo.

What are you currently working on?

I’m in the Savings Squad where we focus on rolling out savings products and changes for the business. We also work on optimisation pieces that help bring more people to the savings section of the website and ensure they have the best experience. So, there’s a mix of search engine optimisation and conversion rate optimisation involved.

I team up with a Trading and Optimisation Manager (our Product Owner), a Digital Performance Manager, a Content Designer, and Content Editors (the Site Builders). We’re often collaborating and doing our agile ceremonies, but for me, the real fun comes from running workshops with them. Getting everyone on the same page and then launching a solid experience together. I’m a huge believer in co-design.

Recently we worked on ‘Enhancing Organic Visibility Through Strategic Product Landing Pages’. If you’ve got a spare moment, have a read — it gives a good flavour of what our work looks like.

What is the one thing you could not live without?

Okay, so my boring answer is hitting the gym several times a week. Though…I’ve packed on a few kg since getting married, so it’s a must-do again. Back in early 2025, I was in great shape, with low visceral fat and all, and proud of the consistent habit I built. It was all about trusting the process and then actually seeing the results. It’s kind of like my UX Design approach ….

You don’t see significant changes overnight in either your physique or the success of a design. It’s the repeated effort, the small consistent actions, that compound effect over time to deliver meaningful results. Just like sticking to a workout plan leads to lower visceral fat and better health, consistently applying user-centred design principles leads to better user experiences and ultimately, better business outcomes. It’s about the long game and trusting that the established methods, when applied diligently, will lead to the desired outcome.

Which three traits define you?

Analytical: I’m an obsessive planner. I like to know the ins and outs of my problem spaces. I often say, ‘Do it properly or go home’. So that means I can be systemic, in a cave working on user flows to find pain points and create logical solutions that work for all.

Empathy: through the role I have, I have learned to listen to respond and have constructive conversations where I leave aligned and bear in mind other people’s perspectives and learn ‘to be in their shoes’.

Introvert: although I can come across as passionate and in love with UX, I feel like I can be impersonal because I don’t speak outward enough for the corporate world. I’ve learned to use frameworks and structure to speak out and engage my colleagues when running workshops and presentations.

Can you tell us your favourite thing about working in the Digital Platforms team at Nationwide?

For me, the real satisfaction comes from tackling end-to-end optimisation projects. We start with well-defined problem statements from the department, and then we’re empowered to craft solutions with a user-centric approach, all while collaborating closely with our colleagues. What’s truly rewarding is that we can directly link our work to measurable results, which is made possible by the strong sense of unity within the team. This kind of environment is gold for designers who are serious about building a strong and impactful portfolio to propel their careers forward. It is what makes my career fulfilling. I feel like my purpose, what I trained for all those years ago, which is to solve people’s problems and produce high-quality experiences is enabled here at Nationwide DPSEO.

Product Designers often have to get colleagues from different departments together and get them to collaborate. This is a lot easier said than done.

You’ve planned and designed the ultimate workshop. Your Miro board is a brainstorming wonderland, brimming with possibilities. You’re ready to ‘facilitate’, solve problems, and unleash creative geniuses in your colleagues. You jump into an activity and suddenly, the Engineer looks less than enthused, and the Product colleagues seem to be disappearing into ‘an urgent call’. Engagement takes a nosedive, and your carefully planned session starts to derail. Sound familiar?

I’ll tell you about one slide I add to all my workshops and how I make people understand their roles. And more importantly: boost engagement.

Framing

Instead of whacking up an agenda first, I show and talk over:

1. What we’re doing in the session

2. The outcome

3. Why it’s important

4. How it will be done

This all might seem a bit ‘extra’ but it helps massively:

• It brings a shared understanding of what is going on. Remember people have their day jobs to complete before they jump onto your workshop.
• It’s a powerful way to make people’s mindsets shift into being participants and part of the design process.
• It stops people from questioning what you’re doing as you’ve told them why it’s needed.

I have used this at least once a month for reviews with colleagues across the Kingfisher business since I discovered it in mid-2023. And I’ve always been able to switch my colleagues on with this priming. This ‘tool’ is not limited to Product Designers…anyone can use it!

This is not my invention at all, I learned this thanks to a book called Collaborative Product Design by Austin Guvella. So all credit to him.

I hope you use this technique in your workshops! If you’ve used anything similar please let me know in the comments. Give this article a clap 👏 if you found it useful. Let’s connect on LinkedIn.

Make your workshops work with framing was originally published in Kingfisher Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

While reading this you might have push notifications flashing, cookie policies popping up, and see recommended articles appear. We have different stimuli fighting for our attention and we have a limited capacity.

Attention is a cognitive function we use all the time. It helps us focus and complete tasks amongst all the stimuli around. We pay attention to finding the information we need to achieve our goals.

Designers can guide people’s attention by showing and highlighting relevant information at the right time. In this post, I will provide suggestions to grab people’s attention.

Visual popout

As soon as people gaze at your interface they’re looking to get their goal completed. You should highlight important landmarks, such as headings, links and buttons, through shape, size, orientation, motion, weight, position, colour or contrast. Doing this will guide people to the landmarks as they will stand out on the interface.

Information presentation

Present information well by having a clear hierarchy. Avoid presenting a wall of text because people will get overwhelmed. You can also use clear headings, bullet points, good formatting, grouping and alignment. People will be able to filter out information that matters to them better. No one reads when they need a task completed. People tend to scan pages.

Avoid disorientating error messages

Do not shift people's attention by presenting static alerts and error messages that are nowhere near the error. Sometimes you will see error messages that appear at the top of a page instead of near the error. This moves people away from completing the task.

Understand your user’s goals

Work with your design researchers, service designers, product owners and managers and see what your user’s goals are. Create an experience map showing people’s goals, and then design to help them.

Remove useless components

Consider removing ‘noise’ that doesn’t solve any problems. Sometimes removing is design. You can do a scavenger hunt task to find out how people go through your product and probe what people used in their journey. You may even find out that you might not have the signals needed by your end-users! As Xinyi Chen says:

‘In an ideal world (from an HCI perspective, at least), we should remove any content or UI elements that are not relevant for any of the tasks supported’ (Chen, 2018).

Learn scanning patterns

Through eye-tracking research The Nielson Norman Group have identified patterns in which people scan information. It’s worth seeing the different types of patterns and designing your UI to conform to those findings if you see fit, or you can research this yourself.

Want to learn more? Further reading

I found these books useful when learning about attention and its implications on product design:

• Design for How People Think by John Whalen
• Interaction Design by Helen Sharp, Yvone Rogers and Jennifer Preece
• Bottlenecks: Aligning UX Design with User Psychology by David C. Evans

I love connecting with and learning from others. Let’s connect — you can add me on LinkedIn.

Designing for attention was originally published in Kingfisher Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As UXers we are encouraged to solicit feedback as much as possible during the design process. Sometimes this doesn’t go down well. Loads of great designs go down the drain because we don’t structure our sessions thoughtfully enough.

You’ve booked a design review and everyone is on the call. You’re keen to share your design and get feedback. You share your screen, show the interface and you ask what people think, and hear:

• ‘Make the CTA bigger!’
• ‘Can we use a different shade of blue?’
• *Awkward silence*…‘Yeah, it looks nice’.

This isn’t useful.

A lot of colleagues misunderstand what we do. Designers are historically seen as a way to make interfaces look professional. Colleagues think they need to tell us what we should be doing, meetings derail, and teams end up focusing on trivial things (see bike-shedding).

This is all avoidable. I’ll be sharing three tips that have made my design reviews more useful.

Remind colleagues of the project’s goals

The way we strive for our interfaces to be efficient, effective and delightful, we need to do the same with our design reviews. You might spend days or weeks designing, but for your stakeholders, sponsor and colleagues, this is one of the many projects they’re part of. You need to reduce their cognitive load — remind people what’s going on!

Before you show the proposed interface, start with your project’s goal(s). For example: ‘We want to reduce the drop-off rate on our checkout cart’. Always put this at the beginning of your Figma File, Miro board, Mural or whatever you use to show your interface so it’s prominent.

Make colleagues understand we are focusing on solving an agreed problem and want their input based on achieving specific goals. This helps feedback stay focused and productive.

Better represent the user by showing your journey

In layman’s terms, show your thinking and talk about how you came to your proposed solution. This is where we show our value as Designers and advocate a good end-user experience. Talk about how other ideas didn’t work. For example, an idea may invite pain points as it received poor feedback or promoted poor usability.

This will give your proposed interface more justification. This helps colleagues understand another level of what Designers focus on. In my experience, this helps show we care about what affects the people using the interface and that our role is to represent them.

Listen to your colleagues

Now that you have talked about how the interface helps achieve business goals and provides a good user experience. You need to let go of control, the interface isn’t yours. The Product Team owns the interface and in most cases, the business approves it. There is no need to ‘defend’ anything. Embrace positive intent. Collaboration is key to success.

Subject Matter Experts, Product Managers and Product Owners are proxy users. Other team members may also know things that you don’t. There may be feedback that makes the project jump to success. Listen to any feedback and make notes to help understand what is being said. Understand the feedback and articulate your point of view again if need be, and then come to an agreement to move forward.

Summary

Design reviews can be a lot more useful when you:

• show the proposed interface is solving a business problem by stating the design goal(s)
• show your alternative ideas to help the end-user
• have an open mind and listen to your colleagues for a win-win scenario.

Want to learn more? Further reading

I found these books useful when learning about how I can improve my design reviews:

• Articulating Design Decisions by Tom Greever
• 97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know edited by Dan Berlin, pages 70–71: Remember the Four Questions of Critique.
• Human Powered: Supercharge your digital product teams with emotional intelligence by Trenton Moss.

I love connecting with and learning from others, if you found this useful drop a comment. Let me know how you’ve overcome design review challenges or if this resonated with you. Let’s connect — you can add me on LinkedIn.

Useful design reviews was originally published in Kingfisher Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.