Like all people who start a business, when I started selling school portraits in 2008 I wanted to sell as many as possible, and make as much money as possible.

With school photography, you don’t take payment upfront. You spend the day taking photographs, then another day preparing the proofs, then deliver them back to the school to hand out to the parents.

Then you have to sit back and wait. And hope that as many people order the photographs as possible.

There are lots of barriers, and lots of reasons why people may not order. They might just not like the photographs, but lots of other things can stop them too.

• They may have forgotten about photo day, and sent their children in wearing scruffy clothes or without brushing their hair.
• They may put the paper contact sheet in a pile of letters and forget all about it.
• They might not have a cheque book, so can’t return the envelope with the payment.
• They might fill out the cheque, put it in the envelope to return, but accidentally put the envelope in a pile of letters and forget all about it.
• They might not understand the ordering instructions on the leaflet, and return to dealing with their toddler instead of trying to make sense of it.
• They might not understand how the different packages work and lose trust, feeling that they are being ripped off.
• They might not be familiar with logging in to a website and making their order online.
• They might get interrupted by their toddler mid-way through trying to make an order on the website, and forget to complete it.
• They might not be able to view the Flash image gallery on their new iPhone, and give up trying to order. (RIP Flash)
• Or they might get confused by the online checkout process, and go to attend to their toddler again.

And as Smartphone cameras get better over the years, the need to even buy the school portraits becomes less and less.

• I designed eye-catching posters to clearly advertise photo day.
• I wrote engaging leaflets to hand out to the parents, spelling out exactly how the service would work and how much it would cost.
• I devised simple, understandable packages that people understood.
• I wrote clear instructions on the order forms, with simple, concise copy.
• I learnt HTML & CSS to build a website and advertise the business.
• I set up an ecommerce site to sell the photos online, long before other school photography companies dared try online proofing.
• I simplified and shortened the login and order process every year, with incremental improvements to the online order process.
• I designed and built a database to manage the thousands of photographs, customers and orders each year.
• I hired developers to implement new features and plugin customisations, for front and back-end.
• I set up SMS and email reminders to increase the number of orders.
• I devised automated emails to confirm orders and manage expectations.
• I listened to feedback every year to refine the whole process and make improvements to our service.
• I tracked the sales and conversion as we adjusted the communications and website, to measure the success of our efforts.
• I ran A/B tests on email copy, landing page content and paper order forms to optimise the journey.
• And I designed an all-in-one WordPress platform to run this entire process and more, all from our own website.

When an advert for the UX Design Institute turned up in my Facebook feed, it was a lightbulb moment. In terms of the purpose behind UX, it put a name to what I had been doing all those years to tackle that list.

I could take my customer-centric approach and intuitive sense for the best way to sell products, along with my interest in ecommerce and digital technology, and pursue a career in what I was truly interested in.

I added to the list of skills I’d learnt over the years, learning user-centred design, interaction design, information architecture, prototyping, visual design & more.

More tools in the toolkit to help design products that people want to buy, and design customer journeys that make them easier to buy.