Andrew Colclough - UX & UI Designer

My Design Philosophy

I've always believed that design is where art and usefulness meet. The goal in design is to learn what people need and serve them in an enjoyable way. While good design can solve a problem, great design brings enjoyment.

This only happens through empathy, listening, and genuine understanding. Sometimes this means a design needs to disappear — to get out of the way so people can get things done. Other times it's adding a richness to an experience that leaves you delighted.

In every case, design is about making the world better for people.

Connect with me on LinkedIn My Resume

ExakTime: Sign-up Refresh

At Arcoro, our time tracking application ExakTime had a quick set-up flow that was clunky and due for a refresh. The sign up flow needed to be self-serve, and minimize friction for the user. Additionally, it needed an aesthetic refresh that was on brand, and built excitement as the user was onboarded to ExakTime.

Challenge

Email confirmations often can result in abandonment or confusion.

Solution

The refreshed design removed distractions and focused on a single goal each step. Clear indication of what to do next was added. The email step used smart links to take the user straight to their email box if possible.

UI hints were added to help avoid mistakes, and give the user a preview of how the information they entered would effect their system. For instance, the Company Url field gives immediate feedback based on what is entered.

ExakTime: Time Off

Time off management was a critical feature for our users at Arcoro. Our administrators needed to be able to create and assign time off plans, our supervisors needed to approve requests for their teams, and our crew member users needed to be able to easily see their time off balances, and make requests.

Challenge

Time off plan tiers are incredibly complex, having many conditional rules. It requires a lot of attention to detail to avoid mistakes with how time is calculated between tiers.

Solution

I designed an intuitive system for administrators to create complex tier-based plans. The math for each tier was pre-calculated and filled based on a previous tier, allowing the admins to clearly understand each segment, and rapidly add tiers a step at a time without making errors.

For supervisors and crew members, we created a simple visual system to easily make, approve, and modify time off requests via our mobile application. Plan types, balances, and statuses were easily understandable at a glance, streamlining the process for all users.

Outcomes

Admins:

Simple

plan creation and management

Supervisors:

Timely

requests and approvals

Crew Members:

Visible

balances and requests

PowerSchool: Design System

I was tapped, along with two other developers to build a company-wide design system for PowerSchool from the ground up. It is a component library built with Sass, Angular 2, and Polymer, and consumed by several applications.

In the process our team overhauled our UX/UI library, enuring that all existing and future interfaces were accessible and up to WCAG, and ADA standards.

The system utilizes a flexible theme system, where we can provide the base design for the organization, but also allow each team the flexibility to customize and extend the library to fit their application's unique needs.

Outcomes

Design & Dev:

source for UI/UX

User profiles:

Admins, Teachers, Parents, Students

School Systems:

15,000

unified user experiences

Incomm: Design System

At Incomm, I teamed up with another designer to build a modular Sass design system. At the time, design systems were only just begining to gain popularity. We built this from the ground up with some innovative tools, which allowed any application to customize the theme of our components, but then also have a safe fallback to our base UX design.

This system (which we called Nxsass) allowed us to create and support several teams and applications across our organization. Also, we had a great area for prototyping user experience, and interface designs.

Press Ganey: Practice Performer

Though an older project stylistically (2011), the work I did on Practice Performer for Press Ganey demonstrates solving very complicated information-heavy interfaces.

Challenge

Health system satisfaction and quality metrics are composed of overwhelming quantities of measured data points.

Solution

I help design and develop a sophisticated and interactive 'target' UI to distill categorical performance information. Metric indicators were given color, shape, and progress indicators, allowing the user to understand areas above or below performance benchmarks at a glance.

In addition to the web UI and UX, I designed report templates that were automatically generated by our platform. They shared a design aesthetic, and focused on further highlighting key metrics to help health professionals understand and implement improvements for their health populations.

Metrics:

500+

data points

Targets:

simple core indicators

Clients:

41,000

health facilities

My Design Process

My UX design process is highly collaborative. I work from early research with the users and stakeholders, listening to their needs, asking questions, and taking notes. I then spend time thinking through what their story looks like.

I work with my team, to further define and clarify the user journey and begin conceptualizing ideas of how to help them reach their goals. Nothing is sacred. Ideas are meant to be questioned, criticized, and sometimes scrapped.

I progress through this cycle between the user and product team to refine ideas until we can present and test early prototypes and gather further feedback. Even at this stage, nothing is off the table. The purpose is to prove our design model before we commit to more time consuming development.

A final design begins to take shape. Whether this results in Figma comps, or functional web prototyping depends on the needs of our team. Development may begin. However, the cycle of testing and listening to users continues, with the goal of refining and delivering proven and pleasant results.