Today marks my first year as a Product Designer, what have I achieved?
Hey there, I’m Tom 👋
I’m a Product Designer for Push Doctor in Manchester, UK.
Today I’m celebrating my first work anniversary, and just over a year being in this industry.
So far I’ve been carefully quiet on Medium and LinkedIn, keeping my head down, honing my design skill set, and sponging up everyone’s advice. I now feel it’s time to share my experiences, processes and as much of my achievements as possible without breaching non-disclosure agreements.
Here goes…
Since studying Industrial design at Loughborough university I’ve always had a great passion for products and how they can be used to solve everyday problems. Applying for the Product Designer role at Push Doctor meant I got to put this knowledge and passion into a digital space.
Not only was this my first professional design role, and in a fast paced start up environment, I was also assigned to a very complex software design project early into my tenure — effectively throwing me into the deep end.
Looking back it was the quickest way to learn, I owe a big thank you to Sabato Urciuoli and Jess Mckenna for seeing my ambition and giving me a shot. I’ve learnt so much and come a long way because of that and it’s a chance I greatly appreciate.
This key company project was to redesign and rethink our virtual video consultation tool. Our doctors use this core product to consult with our patients many hours a day. It presented a huge opportunity to revamp the UX/UI and build this SaaS software from the ground up; centred around our new partnership with the NHS, our clinicians feedback and a host of cool new features.
To begin with I worked closely with our Product Manager and User Researchers to establish all the user/product requirements, carefully compiling a large list of feature requests and regulatory boundaries. Next, I ran some accelerated design sprints with a multidisciplinary team aimed at kickstarting a clear design vision and provide answers to our high level questions. We then also completed a competitor analysis matrix for multiple competitor verticals, until all flows and system architecture were understood. Throughout all this period we held regular user workshops and interviews obtaining perspectives and feedback from clinicians working both digitally and in surgeries.
After several months and many cycles of research, ideation, prototyping, and testing, we reached a design solution for the core functionality that covered both business and user requirements. I extensively used Figma and Protopie and I was able to create a realistic mockup that accurately represented a consultation with a patient. This high-fidelity prototype was critical in gaining us valuable insights into both the usability and first impressions our design solution was achieving.
The feedback loop enabled me to design further, faster and develop to a point where I now believe we’ve reached a well considered, user friendly product, empowering clinicians to provide online medical care that is safer, more efficient and represents our future vision of healthcare. I always set out to work for a company that can make a real positive difference to people’s lives so I’m lucky to have found just that. Undoubtedly these design decisions will lead to faster and more accurate diagnosis, potentially saving someone’s life as a result.
It really has been a busy year! Aside from the doctor consultation software, I’ve also worked closely with our operations team and newest designer Georgia Duckett to review and redesign our method of scheduling clinicians. This was a very challenging project, similar to those headache-inducing maths questions they’d throw in right at the end of the exam just to make you sweat. While it deserves an article of its own, I’m pleased to say we’ve hit the first checkpoint and version 1 is currently being developed.
Finally, while I’ve been a heavy contributor, this all wouldn’t have been possible without a world class team of people around me. So shout out to Tom Clegg, Aldous, Georgia Duckett, Ellen Setterfield, Charlene Panis, Will Tarpey, Leanne Beverley, all our developers, our medical team, and anyone else involved! It’s been a big team effort and I value all your input!
All in all, it’s been a challenging but fulfilling year and I’m super excited to see the results come to life and make a difference over the coming months. For now, back to iterating and striving for pixel perfection.
