Adding UX to the toolkit: How I am levelling up my business support

If you’ve followed my work for a while, you’ll know I’m always looking for ways to make businesses run more smoothly. I look to create environments with less friction, clearer structures, and easy decision-making.

So it is not a big leap to learn that I’ve recently started an immersive User Experience (UX) Design course with General Assembly.

This isn’t a pivot away from what I do. I'm seeing it very much an extension of it.

A natural next step, not a rebrand

At its core, UX design is about understanding people: how they think, what they need, where they get stuck, and how systems, services and products can be designed to support them better.

That’s work I’ve been doing for years - just often without calling it UX.

Whether I’m helping a business streamline their processes, clarify an offering, plan a launch, or untangle a messy backend, the work always starts in the same place:

what’s not working for the people using this?

More often than not, the user has been the Business Owner and the service /product, their business but I am really enjoying learning more now about ideal clients, customer archetypes and digging into making user personas to help us understand and empathise with our client base and be able to craft services and products that ultimately meet their needs.

The course is giving me the language, tools and frameworks to go deeper into that thinking, and to apply it more intentionally.

What the course actually involves

This isn’t a light-touch or theoretical qualification. The General Assembly UX course is immersive and hands-on, focused on real-world application rather than abstract principles.

It covers everything from user research and problem definition through to ideation, prototyping, testing and iteration.

There’s a lot of emphasis on:

• understanding user needs before jumping to solutions

• testing assumptions rather than guessing

• backing up your thinking and design choices with evidence

• designing with clarity, accessibility and usability in mind

It’s practical, challenging, and very relevant to the kind of work I already do with business owners.

How this feeds into my current offering

What excites me most is how directly this learning will go on to support my consultancy work.

UX design isn’t just about apps or websites. It’s about:

• designing clearer journeys

• removing unnecessary friction

• making decisions easier

• creating systems that work for humans, not against them

  
  

That applies just as much to a small business’s processes, services and offerings as it does to a digital product. As I move through the course, I’ll be sharing insights, examples and ways this thinking can be applied to:

• organising and structuring businesses

• refining services and offers

• improving customer experience without adding complexity

• making strategic decisions with more confidence

  
  

All in a way that’s practical, realistic, and usable. Not jargon-heavy or definitely not over-engineered.

Continuing to learn, so I can support better

For me, professional development isn’t about collecting titles. It’s about staying curious, sharpening how I think, and making sure the support I offer is thoughtful, relevant and grounded in real experience.

This course feels like a strong addition to the work I already do . I see it as another tool in the kit, another way to help clients make better decisions and build businesses that feel clearer and calmer to run.

I’ll be sharing along the way (what I’m learning, what’s challenging, and how it all connects back to real business problems).

If you’re interested in structure, strategy, design-led thinking, or simply making things work better, you’ll probably find something useful in the process too. Ready for more?