Contributed to user interface design processes

Situation. The interfaces across our projects were uneven. Some were fine, some had clearly been built by engineers thinking about the data model rather than the person who’d have to use it, and the design decisions weren’t always made with the end user in the room. On a web‑map product especially, the map is the easy part — it’s the controls, the filtering and the flow around it where people get lost.

Task. Getting involved in the UI design process was part of the role — to help make the interfaces something people actually found intuitive and pleasant to use, not just functional.

Action. The role wasn’t the designer’s, but it sat in the design process and brought an engineering perspective — pushing on layout, on the flow through a task, on whether a screen was actually clear or just familiar to the people who’d built it. These were React, Angular and Vue front‑ends sitting over Mapbox and Leaflet maps, and a lot of the usability lived in the details: how you filtered a dataset, how you moved between floors on an indoor map, whether the thing told you what it was doing. Mostly it meant asking the dumb‑user questions early, while they were still cheap to fix, instead of after release when the confusion came back as support tickets.

Result. The interfaces got more intuitive and more polished, which end users felt directly, and it lifted the overall quality of what got put out. Getting the usability questions asked during design rather than after release is most of what made the difference.