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 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[...]