Championing Design Excellence at BioMark
Organization Background
BioMark is a health tech company operating in the realm of health and wellness, serving as a vital link connecting laboratories, doctors, and patients. As a UI/UX designer, I established and upheld design systems, wireframes, and operations for the design team, ensuring our smooth functioning and continuity.
Company Details
Acquired by Pathology Asia Holdings in 2021
Role
UI/UX Designer: June 2021 - Feb 2024
Background
I led initiatives by instituting design processes and cultivating a culture of design leadership within the company. In the absence of a design manager, I had to quickly adapt, learn, and acquire skills on the fly, making effective use of online resources and drawing upon my experiences from my design boot camp. Through these efforts, I successfully implemented design initiatives from scratch that helped build our company's design capabilities.
Journey as a Designer
My tenure at BioMark has been enlightening, notably in building the design team and establishing processes from scratch. Adapting to challenges and resource constraints without a design lead while pursuing results despite these barriers has been a steep learning curve. Through my journey, every challenge was an opportunity for deeper insights into my growth as a UI/UX designer. Embracing stakeholder feedback was crucial in collaborating for improvement, their input refined my work while growing and pushed the boundaries in healthcare design.
Established and Led Design Initiatives
In my role as a UI/UX Designer, I've championed a design culture marked by streamlining processes, collaboration, and efficiency as these were missing prior to me joining the company.
Product Onboardings
I introduced biweekly onboarding sessions for new employees where the design team helped to facilitate their transition into roles easier resulting in them understanding the company and products better from 2 weeks to 1 day. Product onboarding then became a standard operating procedure for new hires entering the company.
Design Advocacy
I've also promoted crash courses on design through 3 workshops, fostering design appreciation and enhancing the company's growth. These workshops engage cross-functional teams, reducing bottlenecks and empowering them to be part of the design process.
Design Operations
I helped to define our design operations, introduced design documentation, and implemented design systems to improve work quality and consistency helping us to reduce designing time from 2 weeks to 1 week.
I have managed designs for multiple projects and 11 interns in the absence of a design lead, these experiences have helped me to do proper work delegation, team, and resource management. The interns learned design principles, integrating these skills into their academic pursuits and preparing them for their future professional environments.
We dedicated 1 month to migrating design files from Sketch, Illustrator, and Adobe XD to Figma, with the goal of enhancing and future-proofing our design workflow. This move was prompted by our acknowledgment that Figma's advanced features were notably superior to other software options with their constant updates and is an industry-standard now.
We designed a traffic light and annotation system in our Figma files to aid in communication with the departments with a robust design system, positioning our design at the core of our operations.
I initiated a weekly design stand-up on Mondays. This meeting involves both the design team and department heads, providing an opportunity for us to share our completed and upcoming tasks for the week. Simultaneously, it allows department heads to update us on their respective weekly objectives and adjust our workload.
Mini Design Challenges
I proactively initiate mini-design challenges for our products if time permits, to continuously enhance our existing designs, features, and flows as there are always improvements to be made, and present to the team these ideas. This serves as a challenge to both myself and others, to stay up to date with current UI/UX trends with improvements and enhancements to the products.
Improved UX Maturity
When I joined the company, the UX maturity was absent and significantly overlooked within the company. This issue presented a challenge, as the absence of established UX practices hindered me and the company's ability to understand its users to improve our digital platforms. Additionally, securing buy-in from stakeholders proved to be a complex task due to tight timelines and limited resources. This challenge was exacerbated by the stakeholders' wanting to see high-fidelity mockups instead, which often took precedence over gathering comprehensive insights from user testing.
UX Maturity Progression
To tackle these challenges, I embarked on a mission to elevate our company's UX maturity. I initiated the development of user testing capabilities from scratch to provide a clearer understanding of our users' needs and concerns. This allowed us to view our digital platforms from the user's perspective, enabling data-driven improvements. With these insights that prioritized user feedback. From its absence when I assumed the role to its emergence in the company's UX maturity during my tenure.
Being Resourceful
As UX was not a top priority in the management. Securing subscriptions to user-testing websites was challenging such as Maze, and I had to rely on other solutions. Notion and Figjam became invaluable tools in helping me streamline user testing tasks and organize research efficiently as the company had subscriptions for them.
With these tools, I built up a UX depository to gather our research. Additionally, with no senior designer to provide guidance, I had to navigate the realm of UX largely on my own, learning as I went. Despite these challenges, I remained committed to improving our products and leveraging tools at my disposal to gather user insights to push the design forward despite stakeholder and resource constraints.
Established User Research
Upon entering the role, establishing user research testing criteria and scenarios became a primary objective, essential for our design process in getting feedback from users on our designs. Starting from scratch due to the absence of existing criteria, I relied on my design boot camp experience which was just a PowerPoint deck. Gradually, this led to the creation of comprehensive testing criteria that significantly enhanced the quality of our user testing and streamlined our decision-making process.
Enhanced Testing Citeria and Scenarios
These criteria and scenarios helped in improving our comprehension of user needs and preferences, guiding our design work toward more user-centric and refined solutions. From using PowerPoint to notion, our capabilities greatly improved and with each subsequent round of user testing, I continuously updated the testing criteria and templates for greater user-friendliness and efficiency. These continued enhancements enabled data compilation from the testing to be compiled faster from 1 day to 4 hours saving us valuable time.
Leveraged AI
Furthermore, I integrated AI tools into the process, facilitating information compilation and the creation of user-friendly questions. This made it more efficient to extract insights from the volume of data generated during our testing efforts and deepen our understanding of user preferences and needs while freeing up time for other tasks.