Dean Macgregor
I am a Graphic Designer/UX designer and this is my wonderful portfolio
I am a Graphic Designer/UX designer and this is my wonderful portfolio
A subscription based raw dog food company
I have worked as the sole UX designer at B&D for a little over 2 years now and it has been a transformative time for myself and the company. When I was hired originally the plan they had was to use my UX skills for gradual improvements and unification of their online assets. However soon after I was hired the company decided that a total rebranding was needed instead. Suddenly I went from running A/B testing on design changes to building them an atomic design system from the group up. The opportunity for learning and experimentation was wonderfully interesting.
Over these 2 years I focus has moved throughout the entire brand but my main areas of focus have been improving their customer sign up journey, transitioning all digital assets from the old brand style to new brand style, providing design support for a multitude of non design projects and most recently building them an atomic design system for use on all digital formats going forward.
As I mentioned before I am the only UX designer (only designer at all at that specific time) at Bella & Duke, as you can guess it's a mountain of work to change over an entire business work of branding while designing the way forward as well. My superiors released this issue and brought in AND Digital to help with the workload.
AND Digital is a stupendously good IT agency based through the UK, in our case we worked with one of the Edinburgh offices. After an intense month of onboarding their team it was decided that the bulk of the AND team would work with the Bella & Duke inhouse developers to work on a technical solution for the future and I would work with the 2 AND designers to figure out how best to build an atomic design system for Bella & Duke.
For the nearly 10 months they were with us I would work side by side with them as we figured out how to best convey the values and services to our customer base. Meanwhile I took every opportunity to learn from this accomplished team.
Here are a few of the screens and concepts that I created for Bella & Duke. I recommend zooming in to get a good look.
Hold Z + Click to zoom in and Z + Alt + Click to zoom out.
When it came time for AND and Bella & Duke to go separate ways we had a strong foundation of design and technology there was still much more work to be done so it was back to me as solo designer to take everything our stakeholders wanted, research how our customers might feel about, put it through my design process, apply that to our atomic design system and start testing those designs ultimately produce dev ready designs. After then it's using analytics, heatmaps and other tools to determine the difference before and after. I’m proud to say it's been a largely successful process.
While working with AND I spent a lot of time with their user research team piggy backing on a lot of their efforts to develop an accurate set of customer mindset, personas and a top to bottom service map of the company, helping out where I could. They kindly taught me the finer points of user research. I was familiar with the broad strokes of the field but had little in the way of experience for it at the time.
I learned best practices, qualitative vs quantitative research, software like typeform, lookback and maze, how to run and adapt research on the fly to get the best result and when to let research run its course. This time and effort paid off because after AND left we were left with no real research team. The task fell to me to plan, run and execute our research ideas and studies. I would have been left high and dry if not for the new knowledge I had gained, now I have not only the skills and knowledge to act as a UX researcher but the confidence to know I’m doing it well.
From the bulk of my time at Bella & Duke I have been running improvements to our customer sign up system. I work with a contractor called Dario https://www.vanderkraken.com/ together we have been making gradual changes to the customer sign up journey, streamlining it. Afterwards he and I would watch the sites google analytics and heatmaps to find out what change our efforts had positive or negative. This is where we begin to find key little insights into what our customers feel and do. While we have made a significant improvement to the number of users sighting up I find more value in using these experiments to map what a customer feels.
As I mentioned before, for a long time I was the only designer at Belle & Duke this meant that I was also responsible for the production and creation of illustrative assets when a project demanded them. Featured below will be 8 of the over 200 icons I have created for Bella & Duke. If you wish to see more visit Bella&Duke.com as of writing this page practically every icon you see on their digital platforms will be done by myself. In addition I have created quite a few dog breed specific illustrations, here are a few of my favourite ones just cause they're fun.
