UX design briefs for portfolio practice

Members can reserve books online, but the reservation lives three taps deep inside a catalogue built for librarians. Front-desk staff say most people give up and ask at the counter, then never learn the feature exists.

Members aged 16 to 70 on a phone, usually standing in a shop or on a bus, who know the title they want and nothing about library terminology.

Redesign the search-to-reservation path only: finding a title, choosing a collection branch, confirming, and seeing where the reservation stands. Account settings, fines and events are out of scope.

• Mobile first at 360px; the branch supplies no dark mode
• Wording must avoid library jargon such as 'hold' and 'bib record'
• Availability data refreshes only every 15 minutes, so states can be stale
• Must work for members with no email address on file

• One user flow from search to confirmed reservation
• Four mobile screens: results, title detail, branch choice, confirmation
• Empty, unavailable and stale-data states
• A one-paragraph note on the words you chose instead of 'hold'

4 days

• A first-time member reserves a known title in under 60 seconds
• Pick-up branch and ready-by date are visible without scrolling on confirmation
• Nothing in the flow requires understanding the catalogue's structure

Shift swaps happen in a group chat at midnight and are recorded by a supervisor the next morning, which means double-booked shifts and staff turning up for shifts that were given away. Verrow wants swapping inside its own rota app.

Cleaning staff working rotating nights, many using a shared or older phone, several reading English as a second language.

Design the request, offer and approval loop for swapping a single shift, including how a supervisor sees and settles conflicts. Payroll, holiday booking and recruitment are out of scope.

• A swap is only valid when both people hold the same certification
• Supervisor approval is mandatory and can take hours
• Screens are read in corridors with gloves on: large targets, high contrast
• Push notifications are unreliable, so no state may depend on one being seen

• A service flow covering request, accept, approve and decline
• Six screens at mobile size, including the supervisor's queue
• A state model for a shift: offered, accepted, pending approval, settled, expired
• Copy for the four notifications the flow sends

2 weeks

• Every party can tell whose action is awaited at a glance
• No path allows two people to believe they hold the same shift
• A swap can be completed without any written message

Controllers watch six separate tools to decide when to discharge batteries. During a fault, the decision that matters is made under two minutes of pressure with numbers scattered across three monitors, and new controllers take nine months to become confident.

Trained controllers on twelve-hour shifts at a three-screen desk, plus trainees shadowing them, plus a duty manager checking in from a tablet.

Design the primary balancing view and the fault-response path within it. Billing, maintenance scheduling and public reporting are out of scope.

• Colour alone can never signal a fault; the room has controllers with colour vision deficiency
• Data arrives at different rates, from 1 second to 5 minutes, and must be timestamped
• The layout must fit a 1440px monitor and remain usable on a 1024px tablet
• No action may be irreversible without a stated confirmation and an undo window

• An information hierarchy for the balancing view with rationale
• The desktop view plus the tablet adaptation
• A fault sequence shown as three timed states
• An alert taxonomy: severity, sound, colour, shape and wording
• A short accessibility note covering non-colour signalling

3 weeks

• A controller can name the current risk within five seconds of looking up
• Every figure on screen shows how old it is
• A trainee can follow the fault sequence without a colleague narrating it