Royal College of Speech & Language Therapy (RCSLT) was an Arthurly project that I worked on for over two and a half years. The users of the RCSLT's services were professionals, working with or often users themselves who had learning difficulties affecting the how they would take in the information and interact with the design. Naturally, the client had a lot of accessibility concerns regarding their digital offering. It was important that in as part of my role being the only designer on this project that I dove into what these were and how they were currently not achieving accessibility for their users. It was important to note what considerations we needed to take moving forward to create the most optimal user experience. It was important to communicate these designs, and the decisions behind them clearly to the product owner; taking them on a journey through the design process to help make them better understand the work involved.

I analysed their existing digital offerings and put together a a report on what was going wrong and why the users had such poor feedback about their services. It was clear that there had been no thought of accessibility in what was already existing. In addition to this, the existing services were riddled with bugs making it very difficult for users to carry out day to day tasks. Our small team carried out a real variety of work whilst on this project; work to their data store on Salesforce, development and deployment of new sites and features, a new learning platform, a large data collection project and various other integrations on Salesforce, process work, etc. We worked in agile to achieve all this and more over the two and half years we were on this project. We took the product owner on a journey through our ways of working and the design and development process. More understanding from the client meant there were less last minute changes and decisions. It also meant we could handle those client expectations better and create a better working environment for the team.

There was lots of poor feedback from users on services offered by RCSLT, a lot of which on social media which meant we were up against it from the start. The initial testing was also rather worrying. Buttons overlapped making them impossible to click on, this was a massive issue on mobile devices. There was incorrect colour contrast on text in various areas on the site making the test unreadable and often failing A standards. The user journeys on the site were unclear and made it challenging to get to where you needed to go, or find help if you couldn't find what you needed. A lot of pages were returning a 404 and meant there were many broken links across the website and other digital offerings.

The existing services were not fit for purpose.

To quickly tackle some of the negative feedback on social media, we implemented short term fixes to win the trust back of the users whilst working on bigger UX changes across the entire service. We worked with stakeholders to design, define and shape what the future of this service should look like.

I created a design system for the RCSLT to use across all of their digital offerings. They did not have a design system previously which meant there were lots of design inconsistencies across different components. The design system added a lot of value to RCSLT and allowed myself and the developer to ensure continuity with the designed components across the service. We took the client through this journey to help them understand the importance of having an established design system moving forward.

When we started on the RCSLT, they had digital learning content across multiple platforms. It was very difficult to follow the user journey of accessing the different content, which was problematic for user, unclear and confusing. It was also incredibly difficult for the client to manage on the back-end - multiple systems needed to be used to manage content and learning materials. We explored the current offerings and undertook design research to understand both the needs of the user and the client. We brought all of the learning materials onto a new platform with appropriate content structures to make the users experience pleasant and easy to understand. Using the design system we were able to quickly bring this idea to life, test, iterate and develop. The end result was an easy to user platform that followed the brand and design continuity of the RCSLT and their service. Everything was stored in 1 place, it was was easier and clearer for the user to understand and access, and a lot easier to manage in the back-end by the client.

We also completed a large data capture project for the client. RCSLT had to collect information on data on the speech and language professionals in their network on a yearly basis. This meant lots of forms needed to be completed, with a single professional needing up to 10 separate forms to be completed. There was very in depth, confidential and complex data needed by the RCSLT. It was also all paper based, which meant they needed to be sent to the professionals, and then sent back - this was not only a lot of admin, but of great cost both financially and environmentally for the client. In addition to this, it was difficult to manage and update any information that was incorrect, which meant that the data was not always accurate, or up to date.

We designed and developed a new data capture service, allowing for this complex data to be capture securely online and stored, securely in their Salesforce database. This new service meant it was easy for a professional to go back and update information and see what information was required to complete a form. The user journey was clear and easy to understand, again utilising the design system that I had previously designed. It was also better for the environment and the data was more accurate and up to date. Mistakes and errors within the date were cut by an enormous amount and this freed up admin time to focus on other more important tasks.

This was a very fulfilling project to work on. During my time on this project I operated as lead UX designer and later moved into a delivery manager role as the design work quietened down and we focused more on the database work and back-end data structures and improvements. I was also involved in the database work and got great exposure to Salesforce and SQL database queries and back-end code.