Building a UX team
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Grew and led a team of talented designers to meet the in house demand for new customer products and features whilst negotiating complex legacy systems and processes.
Head of UX Customer Experience – March 2013 – March 2015
Creating a UX team
At Barclays, I had the opportunity to recruit, build, and lead the UX team for UK retail banking, fostering a culture that balanced professionalism with informality. I emphasised autonomy, for designers to take ownership of their work and create exceptional designs. The goal was to bring together highly creative individuals with a genuine passion for their craft, alongside the patience and persistence needed to bring those ideas to life in a complex corporate environment.
I was focused on creating a team that could deliver Barclays retail banking’s digital propositions and development initiatives. Under my leadership, the team grew from 4 to 12 designers, working on up to 50 projects each year. Together, we transformed complex retail banking financial products into simple, elegant user experiences that made a difference for customers.
I created a team kanban board (it covered our whole studio wall), I encouraged agile working processes, and held regular team stand-ups to ensure designers could always see the bigger picture and stay aligned with the department goals.
I encouraged the use of service design methods and best practices, as I felt this would improve the team’s approach to solving complex problems and creating better end-to-end user experiences.
We also built an in house user testing lab with Seren to improve research and testing processes. Designers could test work easily, meaning design decisions became evidence and data-driven, which created higher-quality design outcomes.
Case studies
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Don’t look back in anger
One of my old colleagues from the Barclays design team recently posted this on linked in, made me realise how lucky I was to manage such a lovely group of people. Couldn’t resist a silly comment.
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Building Barclays UX team
I was asked to turn around the UX team by Jo Brown (Director of Propositions and Development, Digital Banking) who asked me to move from Seren to join her at Barclays. It was the beginning of two or so years of very hard work, I wanted to build a confident team culture that allowed my […]
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Responsive banking dashboard concept
The user’s dashboard should be an honest, fun, collaborative, conversational, engaging interface that lets the user control their money in the Ginkou bank. So that they feel that they have control of their finances. The bank is supporting them in achieving their goals in life with simple financial management. The dashboard represents a move away […]
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Evolving the user experience of a corporate website
Large corporate website are constantly changing. New products to promote, and new commercial goals. The users needs change from desktop to mobile, from mouse to touchscreen, from static to dynamic. An existing web site can begin to look tired, staid and incoherent. Over time each area of the site has created a solution unique to […]
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Code is poetry
With a corporate bank there are many conflicting sources of design and creative direction. So having gathered the users needs, understood the sites objectives, discussed the functional specifications and content requirements the project has to navigate through the corporations design culture. This culture is always changing, like a river.
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Barclays Omake
This is a concept idea for making banking more engaging. I am using the idea of a points rewards system to reflect the users engagement with Barclays products and services. It may be possible to then associate these omake with a financial reward. Omake is japanese for extra, bonus, discount and I am using it […]
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Denkarbeit
I wish I had run more workshops at Barclays, as its a great way to get inside the teams head, and where their thinking is. These are my notes from a workshop I ran in January 2014. It is also just to enjoy ‘thinking work’. Denkarbeit. The team spend so much time creating material I […]
