The problem to solve

I led discovery to reframe the business problem, align executives on risk‑aware scope, and define a phased, evidence‑led approach that prioritised fairness, visibility, and trust.

• Reached agreement on framing the problem, business risks, guardrails, and decisions
• Led product feature ideation workshops, journey mapping, and feature prioritisation
• Prioritised feature roadmap by impact and downside risk using Kano analysis
• Tested assumptions quickly without over‑investment using AI-accelerated design

The post Reducing churn risk through tenure‑based recognition appeared first on davehone.com.

I needed to reconsider the customer experience for rewards to introduce points redemption processes for both outright purchase and ongoing repayment plans. I also needed to introduce member authentication to the flow, to enable personalisation and rewards membership functions.

The problem to solve

To design feasible and desirable personalisation, I needed to redesign the customer flow

• When was the earliest that an influential and viable personalised price could be shown?
• How to balance additional complexity of points currency with the desirability of rewards pricing?
• How to design an engaging experience that had a viable backstage process?

The work done

• Analyse competitor strengths and weaknesses with heuristic evaluation
• Synthesise customer experience principles to influence decisions
• Co-create the experience to understand the best fit within constraints
• Test the customer experience with an iterative prototype
• Monitor engagement, conversions and feedback after launch

Strengths, weaknesses and opportunities

To answer the question, “why buy from Telstra?”, we needed to synthesise design principles for our rewards program so that we could evaluate our design ideas against a ‘north star’.

I used a heuristic analysis to evaluate 12 competitor rewards programs. For each key experience, noting moments of joy, integrations, touchpoints, frustrations, trust and transparency, and the ease of use including constraints of how and when rewards currencies could be used.

I synthesised the following rules of thumb from what was working, and what wasn’t.

Preparing for usability testing

After facilitating co-design sessions with key stakeholders from product, design, technology, legal, and customer service, I evaluated 4 options for flows against each of the 4 customer experience principles.

I prepared an interactive prototype of the proposed solution for message placements, progressive personalisation and authentication, rewards redemption, and discounted price.

The post Retail personalisation with loyalty rewards appeared first on davehone.com.

When redesigning a self-service portal, I needed to prioritise the highest value improvements to work within budget, but also keep a strategic end-goal in sight.

Using design principles to generate insights, I prioritised a design roadmap that fed the product backlog, worked on redesigns with an iterative design plan, and added to content and accessibility guidelines to achieve consistency.

The problem to solve

• Applicants need to resolve blockers quickly to avoid delays and lost opportunity
• Application delays were a risk to business revenue potential
• Feedback themes were usability, accessibility, mobile experience and process fit
• Enquiries needed to be sent to the right place to avoid processing delays

Approach

Working with lean and agile principles, I needed to focus my design efforts on the highest value improvements:

• Review against industry-recognised design heuristic conventions
• Collaborate with stakeholders and experts to prioritise improvements
• Order a backlog by business viability, technical feasibility and UX desirability
• Design an iterative hypothesis to address the highest priority improvements

Building the case for redevelopment

After commencing the review, it was clear configuration alone would not address enough of the issues found, and that to achieve accessibility targets, the effort would exceed the available resources.

Ordering the backlog

• Issues were prioritised by business viability, UX desirability, and build feasibility
• The highest priority issues were estimated and added to the product backlog
• Additional work orders were created for redevelopment to address the backlog
• Remaining work was added to the design roadmap and guidelines created

The following example shows how the review was applied to redesign a contact form.

Contact form redesign

Current state review

I started redesign tasks using the design review and backlog to break down the big design piece into smaller units of work. As an example, here’s a summary of the design review for the contact form.

• Guidelines needed

  • Writing style inconsistencies included use of passive language, inconsistent sentence case, inconsistent first-person references (“your”, “my”, “their”), and inconsistent proper noun capitalisation
  • Design inconsistencies included the use of components mismatched to the type of question, like pull down lists with hundreds of options, and checkbox components used when a radio control was more appropriate.

• Simplified form design

  • A single column form layout was needed to reduce the risk of omission errors
  • The number of questions needed to be reduced to fit on a single page, by conditionally hiding irrelevant questions, and removing the unnecessary information gathering
  • On-screen instruction was needed to explain what information was needed, but instructions for how to use a web interface (e.g., ‘click below’) were not needed.

• Improved accessibility

  • Pull-down option select elements were not accessible when used to show hundreds of options
  • Unanswered mandatory questions should not have had a valid answer selected by default, so that omission errors would be detected
  • Temporary placeholder text should not have been used for instructions because they disappeared. Persistent helper text was needed for error correction (e.g., to explain phone number formats).

• Mobile experience

  • Ineligible text that appeared partially off screen and text that was obscured under overlapping elements reduced form usability
  • A responsive design was needed to re-flow wide content to fit the screen, and replace fixed width tables that did not resize
  • The mobile navigation needed redesign so that navigation links were usable and not obscured off-screen
  • The mobile header needed redesign. One quarter of the mobile screen was filled with unused white space that displaced useful content.

Download design review (PDF 11.2Mb)

Future state redesign

Using Figma and a design system based on Fluent, I needed to redesign components to address the accessibility issues and improve mobile compatibility.

The design had to accommodate two states: a future state, and an operational state:

1. Future state: a strategic end-user focussed design that addressed 422 issues and achieved WCAG 2.2 AA success criteria with a contemporary design system
2. Operational state: a design iteration, collaborated with product and technical teams, based on a prioritised roadmap of 20 of 422 improvements and the legacy design system.

The redesigned contact form

• Reduced redundant form choices from 600 options to 20 options
• Responsive and mobile compatible, and WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility improvements
• Content consistent with writing style guidelines.

The post Prioritising a product backlog with lean UX appeared first on davehone.com.

Approach

RMIT’s public website supported a huge range of services, from course discovery and new student acquisition to current student front doors for support and services. The existing interface was fragmented, inconsistent, and difficult to maintain. To deliver a sustainable uplift, I needed to:

• Build a deep understanding of the breadth of services across the university
• Lead design across organisational silos to gain buy‑in on a shared look and feel
• Construct a new design system compatible with legacy CMS constraints
• Translate photography and print‑brand elements for digital‑readiness

Work I completed

I joined the project as Senior UX Designer, responsible for shaping the user experience and ensuring the new design language could be implemented within RMIT’s ageing CMS. My work included:

• Extend the UI/UX design system

  • Retrofit the agency-provided visual designs for compatibility with legacy CMS, and evolving brand and content and UX requirements
  • Redesign the navigation, visual design, page grids, interface patterns, brand images, and proposed information architecture to match the legacy content feed
  • Test the new information architecture, new navigation, and new interface patterns.

• Assist content migration

  • Cross-functional stakeholder engagement across multiple organisational silos
  • Influence work without authority, enabling different ways of working with a unified look and feel
  • Design dozens of new content templates and new UI patterns that match real world context
  • Photography for use across the site for brand and content purposes
  • Design sub-brand applications for campaign sites, schools, and RMIT International.

• Improve accessibility

  • Interview students living with a disability to test the new design with assistive tools
  • Test intuitiveness of key journeys with English-second-language international students
  • Test cognitive load of complex tasks using course information.

Results

The project delivered a more consistent, accessible, and maintainable digital experience for RMIT. It also laid the groundwork for stronger digital governance and a more unified brand presence.

I had an excellent foundation from external agencies Symplicit, U1 and Reactive taking on the initial visual design and journeys, our internal leadership team driving organisational change along a bumpy road, and our long-suffering digital content team. Together we delivered:

1. Successful testing and rollout of a my redesigned navigation and content structure
2. Collaboration with content teams across the university to rebuild hundreds of pages
3. Close partnership with engineering to transform legacy CMS outputs with CSS and JS
4. The RMIT site relaunch in 2013, establishing a modernised foundation for future digital work.

The post RMIT University GUI Design System appeared first on davehone.com.

I was asked which of two shopping cart designs was more likely to meet user needs. A live test wasn’t practical, so I needed data to inform a high-risk decision.

I proposed a robust and achievable research plan to support a redesign of a shopping cart. When the need arose for unplanned research, I needed a way to get more customer insights and keep the rest of my schedule intact.

Urgent unplanned work is not ideal, but when new discoveries raised important questions, I needed to adapt my plan. Although qualitative activities could have given us more depth, they would have disrupted my scheduled activities, inconvenienced participants and exceeded my budget. Quantitative, unmoderated research was an achievable and effective way to get a ‘quick read’ of categorical preferences.

As part of a broader research program that included multiple research methods, planning a contingency for quantitative design evaluation got the best outcome for the project.

The question, “Which of these two design concepts will we develop?”, could have been researched using multiple methods but the question was one of probability. Which design, A or B, was most likely to meet user needs?

The problem to solve

• Design axioms (rules of thumb) and customer feedback indicated two potential design solutions (A or B)
• Both designs (A and B) followed reasonable practice and weaknesses were not immediately obvious
• Axioms for simplicity and affordance when taken to extremes, appeared to conflict
• Preferences were important and experience (not price alone) was driving channel value

Approach

• Participants used a mobile prototype to perform tasks and answer questions on their own device
• 300 participants were split into two balanced cells with similar characteristics, and each cell rated one design
• Non-parametric tests found statistically significant differences in how the designs were rated
• Results were shared quickly, followed by a report and a solutions workshop

Report

The report drew conclusions by analysing closed-question responses (what responses participants chose) with sentiment analysis of free-text responses (why they chose that), and a statistical test on how customers rated each design (A or B).

Non-parametric tests were used to report on statistical significance of preferences. This analysis was the first step of an ongoing optimisation experimentation program, and the methods evolved after live experimentation capability was deployed.

It’s important to note that although analysis revealed a statistically significant result by comparing 2 variations, and did so at the early stages of design before development, that this experiment wasn’t concluded until an uplift was observed in production.

The post Optimising shopping cart experience appeared first on davehone.com.