Aminata Grut UX Design •Photo • Journalism

RESUMÉ & References

assignments through 2015-2021

.:: Since August 2021 | Zington. Working with UX Design and UX Writing, as a consultant for the company's clients. Also coaching co-workers, giving classes and lectures on UX Writing, Content Design, and how to use the language as a vehicle for creating Diversity and Accessibility.

.:: Since August 2020 | SMARTse. Working with UX-design, Frontend Development, UX-writing, UX-research, Webdesign. Temporary contracts by the hour. Product deliveries during this assignment: Deploy of websites, member log-in systems and webapps (in the process).

.:: 20201102-20210331 | Studio DN. Working temporarily as a host with the News Podcast for Dagens Nyheter, one of Swedens largest dailies. You can find all the podcast episodes on Podplay.

.:: 20191001 – 20200517 | Sveriges Radio, Play. Digital Development Editor, with UX-competence, at the Play Editorial Development Department, Swedish Radio. Headed cross-functional teams in UX-research and design of interactivity. Participated in writing tender documents for a visualization tool software.

.:: 20190603 – 20190930 | Sveriges Radio, Ekot. News Monitor. News Caster. Ekot Live, Breaking News Editorial of the Swedish Radio.

.:: 20180625 – 20190310 | Riksförbundet Attention. Webmaster, Head of digital platforms, UX & Development. Edtitor of Content & Social Media. Headed a remake of the backend and secured better accessibility for the main websites (including a web shop) in close cooperation with developers. Acted as Tech lead for several campaignes to win-back former members, using sms, landing pages and onboarding. Mapped and designed user journeys, worked with automated mails, used analytics to adjust the site and increase the number of visitors, etc.

.:: 20171015-20180530 | Bonnier Broadcasting's UX-team. UX-Writer in the team for a VOD-streaming service (TV4 Play and C More) , design assignments for the products – iOS and Android native apps, a Samsung TV app, and Webpages – always in close cooperation with the developers towards deploy. Participated in documentation of Usability testing and A/B-testing. Head of cross-platform tonality projects, for a Content Design System. Helped with text for automated mails to customers.

.:: 20170101-20190310 | Self-employed. CEO, with my own company. Examples of products designed, developed and deployed during this time: Several webpages for small companies. A News site for a local Newsmagazine, designed for mobile first. Automated mailresponses and Newsletters. Graphic design and Digital strategies for small sized Culture Production Companies. Large stage events in dance and music, stage programs and logistics for conferences. I also produced Journalism, Information, some Webediting and small Frontend jobs.

.:: 20150415 – 20161114 | Sveriges Radio, Ekot. News Monitor, Studio Reporter, Ekot Live. News Caster. Webeditor. Intake. Social Media Manager. Producer and supervisor of broadcast and reporting at Ekot Live's News Desk*

...

Before transitioning to UX and Frontend I worked as a journalist for many years, as a freelance, and a regularly returning fill-in, with some of Swedens most read and listened editorials ... With Ekot & Ekot Live, Sveriges Radio (the National Swedish Radio), I did Breaking News streamed over the web and/or live on the FM frequency band, depending of the dignity of the news, monitoring International and National News, studio reporting and producing. With the Swedish Daily Newspaper Dagens Nyheter I did ready making and later was a host with their news podcast Studio DN (2020-2021). And with the Daily financial paper Dagens Industri I was a summer fill in 2003-2007.

Other news outlets I've worked with: TV4, SVT, Local Swedish National Radio in Gotland, Malmö, Västerås and Stockholm, Aftonbladet, SvD, Metro & Gotlands Tidningar, Weekly papers SAFtidningen Näringsliv, Invandrartidningen Sesam, as well as other Weekly Magazines, Childrens Magazines, Union Papers, and more.

REFERENCES: Ask me

Education: Hyper Island (UX-Design), Changemaker Educations (Frontend Development), INFORMATOR (AGILE METHODS & SCRUM), STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY (SOCIOLOGY, LAW), Skurup, JMK (Journalism), Arabiska (Umeå Universitet) FOJO, Grafiska yrkesskolorna (Graphic Design, Printing Techniques, Bookbinding, LAYOUT, Readymaking).

KEYWORDS: UX-DESIGN, UX-WRITING, USER-RESEARCH, DESIGN WORKSHOPS, IDEATION, USABILITY TESTING, JOURNEY MAPPING, CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT, CONTENT, AND USER-CENTERED INTERACTION. PHOTOS. VIDEO. MOTION GRAPHICS. PRINT. MULTIMEDIA. IMMERSIVE JOURNALISM. VR/AR/XR. BREAKING NEWS. WEBB EDITING. SOCIAL MEDIA. EDITORIAL PROJECTS. STRATEGIES. ANALYTICS. LOGISTICS.

SMARTSE AB 2020-2021

Working with the cooperative Smart Production House I have managed several UX-design projects that resulted in deployment of digital products, like the website above for an acrobatic duo, "Acrobalance". At the moment, I'm involved in an ongoing Product Design process with the goal to create a new, supportive app for children and young adults who are exposed to racism, in cooperation with the organization Friends, Forum for Parents to Afroswedish Children, BLM and others.

My design process almost always follows the Double Diamond – discover (insights), define (focus areas), develop (potential solutions) and deliver (solutions that work). Usually I typically start the process starts with collecting facts for a first Design Brief, in a dialogue with the Stake Holder/s. This might also additionaly take the form of a Design Workshop. After that I will proceed to define what to focus on in the design. Once that is done, on to Hypotheses, "How might we"-questions, and Experimental questions, followed by performing Quantitative and Qualitative User Research. When insights are reliably in place, I will probably facilitate at least one Design Workshop with the Stake Holder's team, to ideate on potential solutions for a first testable prototype. After producing, testing, iterating and deciding on a final MVP (MLP) prototype, the Development, Frontend, and Deployment will either be done by me, or involve cooperation with external or in-house developers.

Above, illustrations from my research on an app for a new brand. The owners wanted to find out if it could be a good idea to give users possibility to support different charities and organizations in one single app, while also providing them with detailed information about the alternatives. The general insights gained from both the quantitative (survey) and qualitative research (one hour interviews with eight different users from the target groups) showed that almost all users feel that they can, and want to do more, to contribute to a better world. What stops them is mainly economic circumstances – but also (and more importantly) that they want to get detailed knowledge about organizations they support to be able to trust them, f.ex. facts about, and insights on how they use their funds. Users also want to know how their own personal engagement make changes possible, and what impact their actions or financial contributions have will or aldready have had.

Users also explained they tend to get very depressed by catastrophic images and doomsday-like predictions about the future, as these make them feel hopeless and see it as less meaningful to give any type of support to anyhting an organization trying to fundraise would support. Interviewees generally expressed they would like to see more positive news and facts, to help them stay hopeful of the future.

Business possibilities for this app would be in small fees from participating organizations but, according to the research, the owner would have to be really clear and open about all costs, and work on their "why". What could possibly motivate the user to choose their app instead of going directly to the different organizations to support? And what does the competition look like? This would be a next step of research when designing and User Testing the prototype if the owner decides to move on with the project. Below, quotes from user interviews, insights and recommendations, before synthesizing it all into a report.

Apps that I used during this process: Trint, Calendly, Zoom, Figma, Kanbanflow, Google Sheets, and Google Docs.

Adding: As recently introduced by Klarna to customers, the platform Milkywire, that started with a photoproject and was later founded by Nina Siemiatkowski, seems to be a better, much more developed, supportable, and loveable version of the idea my stakeholder wanted to investigate on – and probably would be it's biggest competition. My guess, knowing what my interviewees said, is that Milkywire has the potential to become a wildly successful and loved product with the users, and do a lot of good in the world.

CORONAGUIDEN • 2020

The chatbot Coronaguiden, which was designed and deployed in march 2020, is an interactive chatbot that can answer questions from users about Covid-19 in both voice via phone, and text via Facebook Messenger. The bot is built on machine learning (AI) and uses Google's voice and NLU (Natural language understanding) resources. It is still online and fully functionable.

Most of the work with the bot took place during, and after, the Hackathon "Hack the Crisis 2020". I was engaged to work with Voice UX and Conversational Design (tone of voice and actual conversation) for the chatbot's voice and text based services, and I was part of the team during March-May 2020. We were a number of people working with Conversational Design, Content and UX, so this was far from a solo project.

Sveriges Radio Play • 2019-2020

At the Swedish Radio I was hired to participate in a time limited experimental niche project, lead by Ekot. The first assignment for the cross-functional project was to design an interactive "candidate-card" for athletes nominated for "Radiosportens Jerringpris". The design brief was short and sweet. Photo of the athlete. Text telling who the person is and what they are nominated for. "Play"-button for sound. Three CTA:s for voting in different ways. And cooperating with the Swedish Television on materials and links for users that were supposed to be moved into their app Duo.

I did the graphic design and the wireframes, and helped implement the html-code on site, a solution that was built in javascript by the team's developer. Our design was reused this year by Radiosporten, which means the future-secured strategy worked out really well (the strategy was to provide Radiosporten with all the templates, where the photos and graphics are possible to adjust in Photoshop, and the text is possible to change in the html-code)

After the first niche project was closed I continued working with the department for Editorial Development, Play. I was assigned to head a crossfunctional team and handpick four experts in a UX research project, where the design brief said to investigate on consequences of implementing a certain new software in the company's native app for sound-on-demand, SR Play.

The team I put together consisted of one IT-architect, one data-analyst, one person from the marketing team, and randomly a developer. With their help I collected User Stories, described Use Cases, investigated on Economical and Technical consequences, went through data on the number of users in the app and analysed many other parameters, some of them building on previous UX-research done by the departments UX-team. The final result was a report, with recommendations.

I planned and pursued the whole research project in sprints. The result of the research was first presented mid-way and then at the end of the project, as a pdf-report with visualisations and text written by me. All the insights were revised and confirmed by the team members on their specific areas of expertise, they also participated in the presentation and answered questions from the Stakeholders.

References: ask me

Bonnier Broadcasting AB, 2017-2018

Assignments with development teams: Part of the UX-team at Bonnier Broadcasting AB from September 2017, working with UX-writing and UX-design for TV4 Play (AVOD*) and C More (SVOD**) web and apps. The scope contained working closely together with the marketing team and analysts, as well as with the product owners and developer teams for the iOS-app, the Android-app, Samsung TV and Web. *AVOD, advertisement based video on demand. **SVOD, subscribed video on demand. A third type, TVOD, where customers pay per view, through renting or buying movies is also represented at C More, for sports events.

During the period with BBr I managed a cross-platform tonality project, involving all departments, and put together a first embryo for a Written Content Design Guide – consisting of a Library with guides, phrases and links for everyone, including developers – to use when a UX-writer is not available. I also participated in documenting usability testing with users.

My last assignment for BBr was to manage content on a GDPR-site, working in four different languages, being fully responsible for the Swedish and English copy, getting basic help from C Mores Copywriters in Denmark and Norway with translating Danish and Norwegian copy, then taking responsibility for the final editing of all languages. The text was juridically heavy and very detailed. The site is still in use, but now under the new owners, Telia.

Finally some more pieces of copy for the GDPR-portal at Bonnier Broadcasting. Remember that even when creating a sign-up form, which might seem to be a simple task, there are many factors to take into consideration. Not the least security. Should we reveal that a certain mailadress is registered? Also legal concerns, the user has to accept being registered by us, and has to be informed about what that means. Also trying to explain complex juridical matters in the example below, on the GDPR legislation.

REFERENCES: ASK ME

Attention, 2018-2019

Assignment: UX-lead, Digital Development Editor, Webmaster and Social Media Manager at Riksforbundet Attention, an organization with around 12000 members, and an informative website with almost one million individual page hits every year and thousands of unique visitors every day. Attention's goal is to secure better conditions for people living with NPF, Neuropsychiatric Disabilities.

My primary task at Attention was to develop and manage the digital platforms. Among the projects that I initiated and managed was an important update of the web structure. I made a design brief, and with the help of an external developer I made sure that the main site got a modernized Wordpress back end. The organisation's webshop was also separated from the main site in order to get a necessary rebuild on a sub domain with a Storefront and Woocommerce framework, for safety and up-to-date functionality. The remake we did was the first major update of the site since 2011.

I mapped user journeys, user behavior, and user profiles with the help of Google Analytics, available tools on FB and a pop-up survey on the site with the aim to understand the users' needs and goals, and made several smaller re-designs. Statistics and the survey were followed up with new landing pages on the web, and page designs were adapted to the "mobile first" concept, since almost 70% of the visitors use mobile phones or surfpads. Unfortunately, since the organization has not hired another UX:er after my assignment, some of our work on the frontpage has been lost in later updates by editors.

To fulfil the organisation’s key business objective ”converting visitors into members” I made sure that the site was updated regularly with news pieces, managed the Facebook page, revived their Instagram, and added a LinkedIn account. I also made sure that we produced explainers, photo, video and motion graphics on social media, driving traffic to the main page, nudging users into becoming paying members.

The campaign to win back former members was very successful, and broke even it's costs, with a setup of personalized sms-messages and a campaignpage for conversion where we could log the behavior of former members. One of my recommendations was that Attention should bring back the conversion pages for all members to be placed under the main domain, in order to be able to monitor user behavior through analytics. This has been done now, after I left.

A good credit to the work, was an increased traffic and engagement via social platforms (in less than six months 2000 more likes on the Facebook page, on it’s way to 22000 followers), a one minute longer median user stay on the site, more pagehits on the website, including more returning visitors.

REFERENCES: ASK ME

.:: Languages

Swedish (mothertongue). English (family language). French (family language). Danish (family language). Also: German. Spanish. Wolof (family language). Arabic (can read, write and edit). Persian (basic level, can read, write and edit).

.:: Digital tools

Office 365 (Word, Excel, Power Point, Outlook, Teams, OneNote and more).

Adobe Creative Cloud (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, ProTools, Premiere Pro, Premiere Rush, Spark, Adobe XD, and more). Editing photos, sounds and video for webb and social media. Readymaking for printed matters.

Axure, Figma, Sketch, Zeplin, InVision, Mural, Miró, Lunacy, Flinto, Balsamiq. Phraseapp, Confluence, Atlassian, Trello, Kanbanflow, Icebreaker, GitHub, Atom, Wordpress, HubSpot, MailChimp, Trint, Airtable, Whereby, and many more.

Please continue to scroll down for A personal letter + PORTFOLIOSOUNDS, PHOTOS, TEXTS & DESIGN

Personal letter

Hello! Great that you're interested in knowing more about me! I will give you a quick snapshot of myself as a professional, with strengths, and some weak points.

If you need an experienced, curious, problemsolving-oriented, positive and adaptable team member, a quick learner with excellent professional skills as well as team management skills, a wide scope of knowledge and an ability to swiftly dive into a new work environment both technically and socially, please call! I would love to meet and greet.

I started out as a Digital Creative many years ago. My foundation was Graphic Design and analog techniques, printed matters and bookbinding, with time transferred to desktop software. After finishing my education in Journalism I started taking on roles as a reporter, and photo editor, became responsable for the network and software at one editorial, and engaged in Public Service Media Production with the Swedish National Radio. I slowly started gravitating towards creating and curating digital content for different channels and platforms, finally arriving in UX-design and the "all things digital"-mindset that carachterizes my work today.

Lately I have worked a lot with research, analytics and exciting data, and I try to update myself daily on Tech News, UX-writing, CX and marketing, through newsletters, magazines, networks and meet-ups.

My biggest challenge as well as the most interesting one, has been to transfer into UX-design, UX-writing and design thinking, learning to differ between journalism and minimalistic microcopy, applying the "don't make me think" method when designing for users.

My forward vision is to be able to contribute in the creation of great UX Design for webapps, native apps, web, voice, media, AI/AR/XR-productions and robotics, with the aim to shape memorable and useful interactions with users. I love to innovate and create new empathetic services, together with great people, preferably in an agile and trusting environment where I can use all my skills, and also be appreciated for thinking "out of the box".

I have a wide range of life and work experience, and a never ending curiosity and ambition to always expand my knowledge further. All the basic knowledge I picked up through the years – I've worked in manual labour (started as a kid, helping out on the neighbors' farm, went on to fisheries and carpentery, left home very early). I moved on to working with Digital Creation and Journalism, and I've studied Sociology and Law. All this experience is what I use and apply in my role as a UX and Media professional. Right now I'm also dedicated to further develop my skills in Frontend Development, AI and Voice UX, Voice Search, UX-tools, and methods for VR/AR/XR, robotics, and other immersive learning techniques.

Since 2015 I have studied with Hyper Island, Interaction Design Foundation, Google Digital Academy, Changemaker Educations, Codecademy, and other online learning hubs like Udemy and Skillshare, learning UX-design and wireframing, agile methods (Scrum and Kanban), Design Thinking and Content Design Systems, Research methods, Interaction human-computer, Usability, Accesibility, Facilitation of workshops, and Analytics. Adding some knowledge of html, css, js, and react, to be able to work with developers in transferring graphic elements and design to code.

I have also been a student at the Voice UX Course, and the UX Writing Academy training program, a four months program created by Yuval Keshtcher from the UX Writing Hub, and I'm now a candidate in their roster. Recently I also attended an uplifting and very useful online Workshop with UX-writing experts Andy Welfle and Michael Metts.

In 2019 I did a short internship at Furhat Robotics. I was able to meet with the people from Furhat again, and apply some of what I picked up on conversational design for social robots, during Hack the Crisis, a Hackathon in Sweden april 2020. I joined their Voice UX-team, Bots for Life, and participated in building a chatbot that can answer questions about the Corona virus, both by speaking over the phone and in a text-based chat. So far the Bot just speaks Swedish, but the platform allows for a huge number of other languages to be added.

Working as a UX-witer for the UX-team at Bonnier Broadcasting AB* my focus was on cross-platform tonality and microcopy in four different langauges, on everything between CTA-buttons and longer texts, inside streaming-apps and on the web. I took part in ideating phrases to be used in userflows, user interfaces and personalisation, and put them in a curated document to be used by others as a tonality guide. Always working in close cooperation with developers of webb and apps (iOS, Android, Samsung TV). Before my assignment ended I made sure to secure a webbased supply of links, tonality guides, copy samples, and updated notice samples for developers, to use when no UX-writer is available. *Bonnier Broadcasting AB offered and developed services for TV4 Play (an AVOD service = advertisement based video-on-demand) and C More (a SVOD service = subscription based video-on-demand). In 2019 Telia bought both TV4 and C More.

During many intense development meetings with marketing departments and expert analysts, I have developed my knowledge about business essentials like KPI (Key Performance Indicators), ROI (Return of Investment), Conversion and A/B-testing, and I have been deeply involved in discussions on how to keep the focus on the user oriented perspective, while at the same time living up to the marketing, and business demands.

Before my UX-education, I’ve been, as a designer and editor, designing and curating webpages, producing and publishing text, photos, videos, explainers, motion graphics and social media posts, as well as laying out strategies, measuring impact, researching on audience statistics and behaviors in real time, making adjustments to front pages, landing pages and headlines depending on the outcome.

Working with many different websites, for organisations and media, I have gained valuable in-depth knowledge on how to manage domains, server setups, responsive pages and updates via repositories on GitHub and Bitbucket or ftp. I have worked extensively with the Wordpress CMS, including adjustments and additions in PHP, html, CSS or JS, but also in other content management systems: Wordpress, Django (python), Episerver, Drupal, and in-house built systems at the Swedish Radio, TV4, SVT, Dagens Industri, Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter. None of hem have been difficult to learn.

This was the longer pitch. If you want to hear the shorter, or meet e for a talk, don't hesitate to contact me!

For now, check out my Linkedin, or my online portfolio with more work samples and photos, most of them in English.

Please scroll down for SOME work samples in swedish

Production in Swedish

OBS! All texts are exclusive work samples. Links and materials are © copyrighted for Aminata Grut and not supposed to be published or used for any other purposes.

Video for Social Media and Web

A short film for Facebook and Instagram, promoting content on the main web page for Attention.

A short film, used as an introduction / start screen for a sports an leisure page made by Attention.

UX-centered work

Some final pieces of design for the GDPR-portal at Bonnier Broadcasting.

More references and samples – on demand

.:: You will also find me at  Linked In, Twitter and Linktr.ee