United Kingdom

UX Design

Design Operations

Product Design

Bachelor of Science (BSc)

Dan Donald

Design systems consultant

Public Speaking

Product strategy

Communication

Collaboration

Problem-solving

Empathy

Stakeholder management

Leadership

Accessibility

Blog writing

Design systems

React

Figma

In more of a product role, I head up the Content & Experience team that owns our internal design system and moves forwards a great deal of the site to be more coherent. There's great challenges bringing together design and development, content and quality with systems thinking to help improve the consumer-facing platforms. Encouraging greater collaboration to get the most from the content and data we have

At our first event (May 19th 2015), we attracted around 300 attendees and flew in speakers from the US as well as parts of the UK. We saw front-end development as a range from close to design through to close engineering, which I think we succeeded with. We covered atomic design, javascript testing, games console browsers, some great interactive javascript experiments, web typography and performance from both a technical and design perspective.

In October, we ran a smaller version of the event, UpFront Mini both aiming to be a more accessible event and encouraging new or lesser known speakers. Again, this sold out and had great feedback.

We're already planning the 2016 event.

In this role, I work between project work and shepherding the front-end developers. My goals have been to improve the agile workflow and continue to work on the quality and productivity of our developers. Since being here, I've encouraged use of task managers like Grunt or Gulp through a unified way of working and encouraged javascript testing and a focus on performance.

I'd started on the desktop site as part of the overall refresh of the Sport site, working on new features and refining the experience for the wide range of browsers the BBC needs to support from the time of the 2012 Olympics; I'd made the 1st version of the responsive navigation on the mobile site and brought back the vidiprinter.

Fortunately, I got to work on a lot of responsive investigation work which lead to working on what has been dubbed internally, 'BBC Live' - a way to present live content through a fully responsive interface. Leading the front-end work, we'd seen it used across the Sport site through the Winter Olympics by millions of people. The architecture should see this work used across a wide range of live events at the BBC, which is a great thing to have been an integral part of.

When the opportunity presented itself, I volunteered for outreach projects including Social Media Surgery and teaching a classroom of high school students how to make websites.

Speak the Web is a series of four gig-styled web conferences: 3 speakers in a bar enthusing about web technologies over a few beers.  Both encouraging new speakers and showing off the best Northern well-known names.  This initial series is run as a not-for-profit to show the demand for these kind of events up North and how a conversation in a pub can really lead to something really good happening.

My role was spit between production management in their busy office and developing sites on my own and alongside others.  During a very busy period I supervised and developed projects for major records labels.  Work ranged from banner adverts to sites using full-screen video with HTML/CSS overlays, from skinning MySpace profiles to Flash widgets.

Working on various projects using PHP, MySQL, XHTML, CSS, jQuery/javascript, consultancy, training and product development.

Both supervising our development team and engaging in development myself, I've worked on a wide variety of projects mainly within the non-profit and charity sector.  
My role can be diverse from client-facing and project management to developing our in-house content management system 'Treeline'.

Dan Donald🇬🇧

About Dan Donald

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