N Brown Group
UX / UI Design & Development Manager
About N Brown Group
Headquartered in Manchester where they design, source and create many of our own products and employ over 1,700 people across the UK. With a 160-year history, N Brown has evolved from a catalogue service to a fully digital retailer.
My role
Working as the UI Design & Development manager for N Brown group, I was responsible for the UX of the group e-commerce sites. Initially brought in as a UI contractor, after 18 months I was invited to go perm and set up a dedicated UI team which grew to 13 members at its peak.
Personal work covered the core UI design and code development which was shared across the N Brown brands, with CSS skins applied for brand differentiation. The UI was redesigned many times over the 11 year period I was present driven by UX best practice involving close customer engagement.
During that time we had a complex UI covering all aspects of the user journey – browse, product details, checkout, credit application, and my account areas – and shared over 40 brand website skins to design and maintain. The sites grew to deliver more than £4 million in online sales per day globally, from a company that was primarily print catalogue based.
User testing took place working alongside our then partner Join The Dots which provided test lab facilities, and suitable demography’s of user types for 1-1 and group session testing of our UI prototypes.
My final two years at N Brown involved working on a £30m business transformation project to migrate sites from Fatwire to a new cloud based SaaS application SAP Hybris and AWS. This involved working alongside project managers and developers at IBM, and later with onshore and offshore development teams at TATA Consultancy Services.
My personal work on this project involved creating UI concepts for layouts used by both internal users of the CMS and a component-based design layout for front-end users to create their own page layouts. Daily tasks involved running UX/UI workshops with team members, creating concepts in Sketch, build prototypes for user testing using Axure RP, Invision and hand coded demos, creating and updating the new group design system, maintaining and contributing to UX UI, and Java teams knowledge bases in confluence, and managing backlog requirements to brief UI micro service based requirements with developers as we migrated to a React front end. The project also involved integration and UI customisation of Zendesk app to improve the customer experience in finding answers to common queries and overall reduce call volumes.
Please view some of the sites I worked on at: www.jacamo.co.uk www.simplybe.co.uk www.jdwilliams.co.uk www.premierman.com www.homeessentials.co.uk
Application experience during my time at N brown included: Sketch, Axure RP, Adobe XD, Adobe CC, InVision, Google Analytics, Zendesk, Bazaarvoice, SAP Hybris, HTML, CSS, JS, Flash, Java, Storybook, Atlassian Suite (Jira, Confluence), WCAG standards.
Want to learn more?
I would be happy to discuss any of my roles or projects further. Please contact me on LinkedIn or by email at markboothdesign@gmail.com