Aquila Heywood - overview

The team support 10 million members across UK, the largest pension & payroll provider in the UK, fifth largest in Europe. Our workplace and retail savings, support all types of retirement income wrappers "out of the box"

OBJECTIVE
+ I joined the team as part of the business transformation led by directors in Product and Development. The UX team were tasked with a number of multi site initiatives.
We designed, and delivered programmes to upskill development teams. Our aim to take the facets behind UX which would help analysts and developers understand the benefits of employing UX.
+ On a day to day I set about documenting the breadth of the solution developed over decades to service the needs of actuaries, and pensions specialists. The business objective is to reduce the substantial training effort required for new users to Altair. The solution compromising a wealth of functionality requires upwards of 18 months training to master the suite.
+ Facilitate design and delivery of green field projects including Pensions Dashboard initiative launched as
part of the UK Governments 2016 Budget.
 


WORK
+ I spent around 50% of my time working locally with the Altair product team, facilitating workshops with customers, developers and analysts alike. Much of the rest of the time was split between creative analysis, BAU, and UX debt tasks.
+ With the benefit of a fresh product team we set about integrating analytics into  into the solution to facilitate capture of real world usage to inform our approach to business objectives.
+ As a member of the portal delivery team we also prepared customer pensions portals for delivery across councils in London, Wales, and Scotland.

+ Heuristic analysis
Identify areas for investigation
+ Design system
Initiated the documentation of the existing patterns, to aid developers in day to day tasks
+ Continuous learning
To give analysts and developers the tools to work in a more collaborative format 
INVOLVEMENT
UX 5 TEAMS [17 - 18]


PROJECT LEADS
Simon Barker, Product Director > CEO
Chris Paul, Product Manager > Director
Holly Donohue, Product Analyst > Manager
Kieren Wright, Product Owner
Steve Garnett, CTO
Nick Cook, Lead Developer


TECHNOLOGIES
DotCMS / Velocity
Drupal / PHP
jQuery
Browserstack


Aquila Heywood
Digital Transformation
ALTAIR - MEMBER APPLICATION
Initially built by business analysts and developers - was refreshed as
- "mobile first" web application
- clearer/cleaner communications in efforts to encourage active engagement with pension decisions / outcomes. 
ALTAIR - 'Thinking style'
Posters & handouts
- prepped for the team - to support process of keeping end user's in mind
- brush strokes rather than "overly rich personnas" - which are hard to recall and calculated approximations
- instance of using cognitive biases to support a key audience (Business Analysts, Developers) -  build with our key audience in mind - the users (Von Restorff effect) - one of 200+ biases identified by psychologists
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