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Celebrating women in tech at the DevelopHER Awards

Elle accepting her award at the DevelopHER awards ceremony

Our Designer Elle won the DevelopHER Award for User Experience

We aim to be confidently humble (quietly confident) in all of our work, but we still want to celebrate that we have an award-winning UX Designer in our midst.

At the end of November, our designer Elle attended the DevelopHER awards in Norwich, where she received the DevelopHER Award for User Experience.

The DevelopHER awards is run by SyncDevelopHER; a Norwich based community group. The awards recognise that technology isn’t just about developers and aim to inspire women into the male-dominated-world of technology by promoting the women who are already in the industry and creating role models.

The User (Experience Designer) knows best

Elle joined Brightec as a Junior Designer in July 2019. Only recently promoted from Junior Designer, she took the opportunity to be more authoritative with her decisions and we’ve loved watching her grow in confidence.

As a team, Brightec invests time in keeping passion alive in our work so that we feel happy and fulfilled. As well as our coaching programme, every individual also has a mentor. Centred around professional growth, mentor/tees meet for 15 minutes a week to discuss improvements in their role and work towards promotions. Elle instigated her regular 121s and formalised them by clearly defining responsibilities and a robust framework for the Design team, and those within it, to develop.

Championing user research, Elle made a case for it to be included in all our projects; talking to clients about its value, the leadership team about different methods and figuring out how to carry them out. She now regularly carries out different research methods, analysing the results and presenting findings to clients.

Most recently Elle introduced the use of diary studies which has vastly improved the quality of data gathered through user research. She demonstrates a strong ability to interpret user feedback and offer suggestions for improvement.

Josh, Brightec Director, commented: ‘The successful launch of a major digital product for the global brand Virgin has been made possible by Elle’s commitment to rapidly and thoroughly validating design decisions through user research. She has created a process that robustly allows designs to be validated quickly and without hindering the engineering process. In addition, she has explored multiple platforms/tools and strategies that have been adopted across a major Virgin company. These have included Diary Studies, Maze, Lookback.io and Userzoom. These methods have also been used and adopted for many other clients, including Ricardo, Waterstones and World of Books.’

James, Head of Design, added: ‘Elle’s designs are creative and fun, while managing to remain extremely user centric. Her inclusion of custom imagery within the Ziffit app, and her exploration around the new brand and Material 3 were really solid. Internally her illustrative work has continued to serve our brand and our marketing presence.’

Elle added; ‘Being a woman in a male-dominated industry means having to prove yourself more than others right from the start, so it was amazing to be in the company of so many inspiring women at the DevelopHER awards. Championing diversity in the tech industry is something that we all have a part to play in, and I feel very grateful to Brightec for giving me the opportunity to develop my passion for UX and for nominating me for this award.’

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