The OCC Innovation Delivery teams – Fusion, Trilobites, Puffin and the OCC UX Design Studio – hold regular Technical Chapter meetings to help advance cross-team knowledge sharing. The meetings cover a wide range of topics, usually around technologies used in on-going project work, but also on tools and techniques that benefit the development process. Docker Compose [Fusion]​​ Compose is a tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications. Operando has lots of modules, each one being a Docker container and[...]

Last month Molly Watt gave a talk at UX Oxford ( ‘Is your window open to all?’ ) on accessibility and inclusive, mostly in digital environments on the web. .@MollyWattTalks starting her talk on accessibility at #uxoxford pic.twitter.com/ptHcumdFHl — UX Oxford (@UXOxford) January 12, 2017 Molly Watt is an inclusive technology evangelist and accessibility and usability consultant. She is also the co-founder of the Molly Watt trust, a charity raising awareness of Usher Syndrome. Molly has spoken at a number[...]

We use a number of tools to help us design products that meet accessibility standards. These are some of the tools we use to quickly test our software for conformance against common accessibility problems. Colour Contrast Analyser The colour contrast analyser from The Paciello Group helps designers determine the contrast of text and other visual elements. This allows us to determine the legibility of these elements, provides a pass/fail assessment against WCAG 2.0 colour contrast criteria and also simulates several[...]

At OCC we are always looking at ways to improve our social care products to meet our customers’ and users’ needs. As part of the design process, we run a series of sessions with stakeholders* and users**. Each type of session has different objectives which are described below. Stakeholders interviews The aim of stakeholder interviews is to understand the business and features requirements. We aim to get a complete perspective on the requirements, so we talk to representative stakeholders. These are one-to-one[...]

At OCC user research (usability testing, user interviews and feedback activities with users) is central to our design process. However, these activities only add value if we test with real users. Doing user research with the wrong people can be misleading and sometimes worse than not doing any user research. So it’s important that we are on the same page when we refer to a “user” to get the most value out of our user research and test the product[...]

Last month we had our Innovation Delivery hack day where the whole team had fun developing small projects outside of their usual everyday work. For our project we wanted to explore React JS, in particular creating a React JS table component and open-sourcing it. You can see the results here. We have recently started using React JS at Oxford Computer Consultants (OCC) for a major redevelopment of our core social care finance product – called ContrOCC – that allows local[...]

Last Wednesday, Reynold, our projects director, and I gave a talk at ACCU Oxford. We shared practical UX techniques to embed UX in development cycles and talked about the importance of a good user experience in tech. Abstract Good user experience is essential to the success of your product, it creates a competitive advantage and saves you money by reducing wasted development time. But how do you know that what you develop are the features that users will care about?[...]

The design team at OCC has been busy with some really interesting work. In fact, we’ve been so busy that we’re recruiting. We are a team of user experience designers and front-end developers. What excite us are projects that make positive contribution to the world. We love working with complex projects in terms of data, user engagement and user interactions. Our aim is to create user experiences that delight users and make our clients, developers and designers proud. Here are[...]

I’m very pleased to publish our first version of the OCC’s design principles. This is a set of values and principles that guides our design approach, processes, and decisions for every project. Coming up with these principles was a collaborative process. I wanted these design principles to be something that we built together and that captured what we at OCC believed in. The applications we design are complex, in terms of data and interactions so working as a team was[...]

Last week Oxford welcomed its first conference dedicated to UX – UX in the City. A collaboration between the organisers of UX Cambridge and UX Scotland, and the organisers of UX Oxford the conference promised to be two days of learning and networking. We sponsored the event and our Head of Design Mariana Morris (@marianamota) was part of the team from UX Oxford who helped to put together the event. Mariana, Ben and I went to promote user experience and[...]

As a design team we love attending industry events. We are fortunate that Oxford has a number of great events on our doorstep for user experience designers and front-end developers. Here is our roundup of events we are attending over the next few months. Smashing Conference Oxford Smashing Conference is back for its third year in Oxford Town Hall. The main conference, spread over two days, is set to be a thought provoking mixture of design and front-end development. Talk[...]

Imagine the scene: two people are seated at a table in the conference room of a council office or hospital. One wears a microphone and faces a camera. The camera records everything that is said or done as a script leads the way through an app on a tablet. You are not on the set of Mission Impossible. You are a user experience (UX) designer at OCC, exploring how users interact with a prototype application or their existing system. The[...]

Jeff Gothelf is the author of Lean UX, a book that plugs into the theory of The Lean Startup and looks at how User Experience design processes fit in with the Lean approach. Jeff was interviewed by Communitech News and described what he believes is the key to building an innovative product or company: Talk to your customers. I mean, really have the humility to listen to your customers. Learn what it is that they love about your product; learn[...]

August’s UX Oxford talk was “Research is boring: How we sell it, do it better, and make better use of it.” from Lee McIvor, a freelance user experience designer and the organiser of lightningUX. As user experience designers, we often come up against the misconception that user research is not important, that a design does not need to be fed by research, but that we can take the “genius” design route, assume that we know what we need to know,[...]