After moving to London, I wanted to refocus on returning to the social impact based work I had started in Seattle at my time with SEIU and Carina Care.
As with so many, cancer has had a personal impact in my life and my journey has led me to Cancer Research UK. As the sole digital-focused designer for the organisation, I led our Design System effort as we work to bring new ways of collaboration across our digital product teams. I streamline our processes to conserve time and resources and collaborate with our accessibility lead to ensure our visual language is as WCAG ‘AA’ compliant as possible.
For our initial design system research, I team up with a Developer, a Service Designer and a Business Analyst, we sifted through our data, conducted further interviews, mapped out the processes and finally I started testing out some options for an initial pattern library approach. This was an exciting time as there was quite a bit of new Design System technology floating around. I used Brad Frost's "Atomic Design" book as my guiding light and tested out software platforms like PatternLab to see how I could get a base framework up and running quickly.
I crafted a new approach with our UI in an effort to align our digital brand to what our in-house designers were creating for our out of home and other print materials. At this time, I was diving more deeply into web accessibility, so I worked so solve some of the current accessibility issues that we had. In conjunction with an integrated marketing campaign that was about to run, I was actually able to put some of this redesign work into product.
This rapid design work actually resulted in a 45% increase in our donation conversion rate. I have a specific case study I'll be posting soon to cover the details of that exciting project!
