2017 year in review: 25th.co
2017 was a epic year for 25th.co, the family business started by my wife and I in 2015. Here’s a quick snapshot of what we did.
YourGrocer
I started the year by finishing the last few months of my engagement with Melbourne startup YourGrocer. The team has grown so much since I started working with them in early 2016, and it was a great journey to be on with them!
My work for YourGrocer was centred around product design and user research. I developed a monthly schedule for user testing, using in-person contextual inquiry and interviews as my main checkpoints with the customer base. I also conducted exploratory interviews with non-customers, to identify gaps in design, messaging and product/market fit.
We finished a redesign during my time at YourGrocer as well, a lot of which remains in place, except for a lot of the navigation and flow of the shopping solution. The product changed dramatically after I left, so my design was rightly superseded!
One of my biggest takeaways from working with the YourGrocer team was how effective remote user testing could be when you’re in a product redesign loop. Quick, unmoderated testing gives you the data you need to quickly make calls about UI layout, colour choices, button labels, IA devices and so much more.
I felt strongly about the opportunities for designers in this space so I wrote an in-depth case study on Medium about optimising product grids for e-commerce that was well received and linked by the likes of Designer News.
Big ol’ bank
After YourGrocer, I needed to find something to lay in a solid foundation for 2018, as we found out that we were expecting our second son, who had an ETA of October 2017.
This put quite a fire under my arse, as you can imagine. My first son, Wolfgang, is a very energetic little dude who needs a lot of attention, so I knew I’d want to help out as much as I could when the next one came along. And that meant building a good runway.
Through the global UX/CX consultancy HeathWallace, I subcontracted to a large Australian bank for 7 months. This was an all-round role, working as a senior in the team who would pinch-hit when there was a skill gap in the permanent team.
Obviously all of this work is in commercial confidence, but I can describe the role that I played in certain projects without giving anything away.
My first project there started with user consultation, workflow analysis, interaction design, prototyping and then finally user testing for the development of a ‘middleware’ tool involved in the flow of transactions from channels like internet banking and retail to the accounting ledgers of the bank. There is a lot of change happening in this area of the business so it was a high profile project that I was able to have a lot of impact on — my favourite!
I then babysat a transition for other consultants around a CRM tool development team, who were in the weeds with details and were in my mind focusing on minute details too much. It was a challenge in that I was somewhat constricted with what I could do, but I did my best to smooth the transition to new resources and the team were great to work and learn with.
My final large project on the bank client was a hard look at the way an insurance product was sold in homeloan conversations with customers. This was a branch-focused project, which required a lot of traveling around to different parts of Victoria to do consultation with frontline bank staff.
The aim of the project was to produce a new artifact and workflow that would support these staff, and my role was to detail the best-case scenario for how the artifact could be produced and how it could be delivered to staff and customers using existing infrastructure.
This meant a lot of process flow design, and a lot of fast talking with teams of people who we’d be leaning on to make adjustments in their own systems — a true consulting project, really. I produced a lot of hacked screens for support systems, nothing sexy, but enough to achieve the desired business goals with minimal impact on existing workflows.
I’d not done a service-designy project in quite a while, since my earlier consulting days, and it was eye-opening to see inside the processes of frontline retail staff, as it always is. I’ve had the chance to see these processes at three major banks now and it’s refreshing each time.
And then
My time at the bank was interrupted by the arrival of my son Stirling :)
…so I stopped working and started Dadding full time again!
That was a wrap for 2017 — but 2018 has already started in a big way with our first 25th.co online training product: Remote user testing and anaylsis over at Udemy. But that’s for the 2018 year in review to talk about!
