In February 2026, I graduated with a Professional Diploma in User Experience Design (87%, SCQF Level 8) from the User Experience Design Institute (Dublin) and Glasgow Caledonian University.
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My first digital brief arrived in the early 1990s, when Midland Bank (now HSBC) asked Chiat/Day to show them what online banking could look like. Digital has been a major part of my career since, so when I found some rare spare time, I jumped at the chance to gain a formal qualification.
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This isn't a pivot to UX design. It's a deeper understanding of how language shapes people's experiences, from agency brief to real-world deployment. Here's an overview of my project.
The brief
Develop a booking experience for a hotel room, from initial hotel search through to reservation and payment. I could choose a desktop or a mobile experience. I opted for desktop.
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During research, several pain points appeared in multiple user tests:
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Having to scroll for information
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Inconsistent navigation menus
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Not having enough images of the hotel / rooms
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Not being able to see a hotel’s location on a map
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Issues around language, especially when choosing extras and during payment
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A payment process that was disconnected from the hotel’s brand​
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To bring more focus to the process, I created a brand, Bootique. It's a collection of luxury hotels for hikers, found in some of Europe's best hiking regions. ​
Research
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Competitive benchmarking
I chose four sites at opposite ends of the travel market: a mass-market booking platform, an upmarket curated hotel collection, a budget hotel that made a virtue of its flaws, and a luxury Parisian hotel. The broad spread revealed how different audiences shape everything from information architecture to tone of voice. Yet, the booking process is the same, regardless of budget or taste.
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Google survey
I also created a google survey I sent to friends who travel a lot, and received 12 responses.
User testing
There were two aspects to this. The first involved active listening and detailed note taking from several pre-recorded user tests. I paid close attention, not just to what users said, but also how they acted. Every person complained about having to scroll for information. Yet, they all compulsively scrolled around pages, whether they’d been asked to or not. This behaviour had an impact on my design.
The second part involved writing my own user testing script, ensuring questions were unbiased and non-leading. I recorded two remote sessions via Zoom, keeping each for reference/evidence.
Analysis
I synthesised the data gathered from competitive benchmarking, my Google survey, pre-recorded user tests, and my own user testing session. ​I used this to explore the booking process in detail.​
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Even though I was looking at the same data, shifts in context revealed new information used to improve my own design.
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A card-sorting exercise helped identify the micro-tasks that make up each stage of the booking process. From this, I developed an affinity diagram showing insights and opportunities to create an improved booking experience. View my affinity diagram (not recommended if you're on a mobile signal due to file size).
Finally, I outlined a ‘happy flow’. This is an idealised version of the process that's used to list every stage, and the micro-tasks and interactions needed for each. See my happy flow diagram. ​
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Design
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This is where assumptions were tested. I listed every interaction needed for the complete journey. At times, I felt like I was designing a different process from the one outlined in my happy flow; a reminder that UX is an iterative process.
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Initial designs were hand-sketched, complete with hand-written copy. I used Procreate on my iPad to build a library of reusable assets - navigation bars, drop-down menus, buttons, calendars, modals, and more - to speed up workflow and spark exploration. Enabling ‘snap-to’ straight lines alone saved plenty of time (and layout paper).
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This also gave me the freedom to explore two search paths: one using a traditional text input, and a visual approach that removed the need to type a single character. I'd love to test the visual version with an audience who enjoy adventure and exploration. After all, Jakob's Law, is like any other law: there to be tested and sometimes broken.
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Complaints about having to scroll for information from user tests led me to develop an booking process that needed virtually no scrolling. ​
View my interaction design file
Prototype
Bringing my sketches to life in Figma (while learning the program) was the most involving part of the course. It felt like an infinite loop of design, prototype, validate. But this approach revealed opportunities I'd missed at sketch stage, from the practicalities of my layouts to the use of affordances and progressive disclosure.
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The result is a compact design where all information appears on first load, lowering cognitive load and interaction costs and ensuring all critical fields are immediately accessible.
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I also went beyond the brief. My competitor review flagged the disconnect between individual hotels and third-party payment processors. To address this, I designed the full payment flow to maintain visual consistency all the way to final booking confirmation.​
View my final prototype →​​
If you're unfamiliar with Figma prototypes, look for blue flashes on screen to find the interactive elements. Click on each to progress.
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Annotations
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The final part of my assignment was writing detailed annotations so the designs were ready for a developer handover.
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I described everything: the appearance and behaviour of each element, how interactive elements should respond to user input, error states, rules on using existing data to shape the experience, and even the use of diacritical characters (those with accents, umlauts, etc) for guest names. Everything had to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) for inclusivity and accessibility.
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Even at this stage, I spotted opportunities to improve the experience, reminding me that the process can remain iterative right through to the build spec.
A real-world opportunity
I’m a member of Zooniverse, the citizen science platform that's a joint venture between Oxford University, Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, and the University of Minnesota.
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During my UX course, I was invited to volunteer to help make Zooniverse, and any citizen science platform, more accessible to neurodivergent people.
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Unlike SETI, Zooniverse projects need human input, not just spare processing power. Through volunteering, I put my UX learning to work, contributing knowledge on everything from heuristics and affinity mapping to user flows, responsive design, typography, onboarding, and inclusive language.
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While the focus is on citizen science projects, the findings apply to any digital experience.
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A day after I received my final diploma grade, I also became a named researcher on a scientific paper that’s been accepted for peer review and is being presented at science conventions around the world.
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To cite the paper, click here (this will always load the latest version).
