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As we near the end of 2025, I wanted to reflect on the past year for the System Concepts’ UX team. Our team grew in size by 2 people this year, one being our lovely new recruit, Sarah coming to us from Guide Dogs and the other being Frankie’s gorgeous baby girl!
The rest of the team remained the same and we continue enjoying our work together with a whopping average of 11.5 years working for System Concepts (including Sarah who has only worked for us for 6 months!).
So, what did we get up to in the last 12 months?
Catherine and I spent the first couple of months of the year travelling to supermarkets and interviewing staff to gather insights and requirements around their Intranet site. Running in-context research is one of our favourite types of projects. We met lots of lovely employees, gained access behind those mystery swinging doors in a supermarket that lead to “out the back” and ate more meal deals than I care to admit.
Naomi and Mickela also enjoyed getting out and about, visiting people in their homes to explore their experiences with TV streaming services. Observing interactions in-context and seeing people’s media set-ups in home proved invaluable to the project.
For projects where going out into context didn’t make sense, but where we wanted to gather real-life experiences, we used online diary study and ethnography tools. One such project aimed to improve our client’s social media interactions with new and existing customers. We conducted discovery research to explore how customers engage with clothing, homeware and beauty content online; perceptions and expectations for the client’s content; and what was and wasn’t working so well. Another involved understanding an investment bank’s customers’ experiences of investing their money and how they went about choosing the right investment approach for them.
We were also lucky enough to run some research with children (one of our favourite types of research to run!). We can’t go into the details of the research subject, but we ran a pre-task via a messaging service and then chatted for 60 minutes to children aged 7-16 about their use of media and suffice to say it was enlightening, funny, difficult and unpredictable all at the same time!
Mickela designed and ran empathy workshops for one of our clients in the lead up to the EU Accessibility Act of 2025. During these workshops we created empathy stations focussed on 6 accessibility profiles born out of our previous research for the client. These stations focussed on blind, visually impaired, neurodiverse and mobility impaired customers and included empathy tools, empathy tasks, guidelines posters and along with our experts who provided support and answered questions.
Another client asked us to support them with our accessibility expertise in running research and producing high quality video reels demonstrating the lived experience of customers particularly related to the key pain points of online shopping. Again, the main objective was to help build empathy and understanding.
We continued our work with both of these clients, and others, with ongoing accessibility audits to support their commitments in making their digital services accessible and compliant with WCAG 2.2.
Our ongoing work continued with all of our long-term clients, who we love working with. We spent more time increasing our knowledge of Airline systems, Business travel booking tools and traveller behaviours. A favourite travel-related project this year involved testing airport check-in kiosks in Heathrow looking at those more complex scenarios that include visas and dual passports with lots of different travellers including those with accessibility requirements.
And our work supporting one of our financial clients with their products and the FCA’s Consumer Duty has continued this year having provided them with lots of customer insight since we started working with them a few years ago.
As well as all this work, we also enjoyed some social events including dressing up as our favourite music icons (think Eminem and Abba!), and getting slightly over competitive with the health, safety and ergonomics team at Ping Pong!
Writing this article has been a great exercise for me. It’s so rewarding to look back at everything we have achieved as a team this year and all the relationships we have continued to nurture. And now we look forward to 2026 and see what that holds for us all.
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