Alex Torrance is an interaction designer based in London, UK
I am a designer specialising in interaction and UX design, with 7 years experience working for the UK’s Government Digital Service. I use agile user-centred techniques to make complex tasks and systems clearer and simpler for users.
I have worked on the Design of the Year Award and D&AD Black Pencil winning GOV.UK, designing user-facing pages and navigation and backend publishing tools. I worked for over twelve years in the creative industries, receiving a Grammy nomination for my work on Sigur Rós’ album packaging.
Case studies
It was hard to find things on GOV.UK
I started on the Finding Things team to look into this problem in March 2015. GOV.UK was actually 2 separate sites. ‘Mainstream’ was curated by GDS staff, and included core user needs, verified by user research. ‘Whitehall’ was where the departments and agencies would publish their content.
Portfolio
GOV.UK navigation
I looked at solving this problem through the alpha and beta and live phases. I created prototypes which were tested and iterated, using the hypothesis driven design methodology to involve the team in identifying and prioritising issues, and suggesting hypotheses for how we might solve those issues.
GOV.UK template unification
In order to create a consistent navigation experience, we needed to unify the layouts of the pages. We audited the existing pages and components, documented commonalities and edge cases and used this to create a single componentised layout that would work across all formats.
GOV.UK publishing tools
GOV.UK needed to integrate tagging to the newly developed taxonomy into the existing publishing workflows used by more than 3000 publishers across over 300 agencies.
I designed new workflows, showing how the new taxonomy tagging could be integrated with the legacy tagging methods.
GOV.UK Verify
I designed and built prototypes exploring how to reframe the introduction to Verify so users would understand why they were being given the choice of different companies, so they could make an informed decision, with the aim of increasing conversion rates.
GOV.UK beta
GOV.UK is the UK government’s single domain website. The beta launched in 2012 and I joined the team soon after. I designed the search and navigation for the beta and worked on various aspects of the site, including department and agency pages and publishing.
In 2013 GOV.UK won the Design Museum’s Design of the Year award and a Black Pencil at the D&AD awards.