Style Guides
Overview: Style guides are a useful tool for communicating the design vision to your company. Often, they are referenced by product, engineering, or other designers who need to see how something should look. They typically outline in detail the colors, fonts, typography, and commonly used assets for a website or project.
How I’ve used them: During 2019 Ascentis underwent a complete rebranding. I was working as a UX designer at the time with two other employees and we were tasked with creating style guides to update our website and any new features moving forward. We worked closely with the marketing team to understand and help define our new design direction.
Once we had a grasp of the rebranding vision, we set to cataloguing and redesigning our existing components and webpages. During this time, we used UXPin’s design library tool to help build a library of reusable assets. Ascentis did not have an existing formal style guide so it was necessary to build our guides from scratch. It was my job to convert the designs for many of our existing pages, particularly those related to timekeeping, and to build any newly converted designs into our library. I helped maintain these assets anytime a new asset was introduced, and my fellow designers were able to easily access prebuilt widgets and components that were already compliant with our new branding.
In 2022 I was assigned as the head designer creating a best-in-class scheduling solution for Ascentis. Before engineering began I created a living style guide that I regularly updated as new pages and features were added. This allowed smooth communication with the engineering team which contributed to our success by allowing individuals to access important information such as fonts, hexcodes, spacing, and general layouts at their leisure.
User Flows
Overview: I was tasked with designing a best-in-market scheduling solution for Ascentis during 2022. This was an effort to modernize the powerful but dated scheduling products Ascentis offered to its clients. This product allowed a user to create one-time or recurring shifts, set the needed roles for the shifts, assign employees to those shifts, and manage all of their shifts at a high level with an emphasis on bringing problems such as short staffing to the forefront of the user’s attention.
How I worked: As the head UX designer for the project it was my goal to make managing shifts as user-friendly as possible. Before the project started, we were able to gather valuable insights through user research and surveys. This research allowed me to re-think how we considered fulfilling shifts with a needs-based approach, pushing vital information to the forefront of the design using a feed. I was able to conduct usability studies regularly with our clients to gather their feedback to help shape the design and ensure we were meeting user expectations.
As the head visual designer, it was my main objective to keep things looking clean and modern to distinguish from our other dated offerings. I engaged in competitor analysis to review what modern approaches and styles were working for other companies. It was also important to me that we had a strict use of meaningful colors to draw the eye to areas that needed attention since our existing products held strong pain points when showing a user what did or did not need their attention. Ascentis had recently undergone a complete rebranding and so I ensured that we adhered to the new brand guidelines.
Near the end of the project Ascentis was acquired by Ultimate Kronos Group (UKG), however our research indicated a high level of excitement for the release of this product, and our ongoing usability sessions found the new designs to be exceeding the expectations of our users.
