Year: 2023
Role: Manager of Product Design
This rework of an existing screen and functionality within the company’s CMS led to big efficiency gains for our internal support teams.
Read below to see how the Product Design team contributed to this effort.
Year: 2023
Role: Manager of Product Design
A small update to one of the company’s internal tools led to big improvements for support teams’ workflows. In this case study, see how UX research helped drive project direction.
Role: Manager of Product Design
Team: 2 Sr. UX Designers, 2 UX Designers, and a UX Researcher
Year: 2024
After a few years of experimentation with our project process, my team needed a concrete and refined process for handling UX projects, especially large and complex asks.
The previous year we had established our team mission and values, as well as identifying our UX maturity level as “Structured” per the Nielsen Normal Group’s UX maturity model.
After retros and discussions with my team, two main areas of improvement emerged. We made these our 2024 Team Objectives: Solve the right problems, faster and learn, collaborate, and have fun.
In order to support these OKRs, we refined and documented an improve project process, based on the IBM Enterprise Design Thinking framework. This diagram was accompanied by a Miro talktrack explaining how other teams would interface with the Product Design team at each stage of our process.
The process diagram also calls out where to start the cyclical process based on where the project is started: from a feature idea, from a problem to solve, or from a place of pure exploration.
As a team, we put emphasis on three areas of our process we wanted to strengthen: Setting project metrics of success, running ‘North Star’ design sprints for feature ideas, and post-launch reporting on project success.
This updated process tailored our work approach to the types of projects we often found ourself faced with: large, complex issues which needed solutions sooner rather than later.
The Miro board I created to house all of our process documentation became a reference and resource for my team as well as product management and engineering. We were able to roll out the updated process with enthusiastic support from other teams and the process is working well as of April 2024.
Year: 2023
Role: Manager of Product Design
I produced this report as part of the Product Design team initiative to become more informed about our users and make more data-driven decisions. This report rolled up persona and other research into one easy-to-reference document.
Year: 2023
Role: UX Designer / Manager of Product Design
Responsible for optimizing page layouts to boost conversions on legal firm websites. Employed a standardized report created by the Product Design team to evaluate project success. The report, tailored for quick stakeholder communication, highlights key project metrics and the designer’s assessment of project performance.
Although the project achieved its success metrics, a small sample size and variations in site performance led to a cautious evaluation. The outcome was ‘Some Success’ due to these considerations.
My role: UX Designer at SmartBear Software
Team: Product Management, Software Engineering
ReadyAPI is an established, well-known product with a wide range of functionality to support automated API testing.
It was time to rework the UX and UI of some key workflows to help new users quickly see the product’s core value.
By interviewing customers about their typical usage of the product I pinpointed a few key workflows to focus our improvements: Creating a project and adding a test.
I started by mapping existing workflows, and was able to discover common user roadblocks. A myriad of ways to get started with the product was the first clear area for improvement. I decided to focus on improving the information architecture to better represent projects’ structure and consolidating the project creation workflows.
We had the opportunity to test a concept prototype with 10 users at our annual conference, SmartBear Connect. We were able to hear from users who had a wide range of experience with the product and validate our design direction.
The next step was to create detailed wireframes and workflows to hand off to development.
I worked closely with a UI designer to implement the new design system she had created, and with the engineering team to support the development.
We tested early builds of the updated product with customers and internal users to continue validating the work that had been done. Overall, users felt the product was cleaner and easier to use.
My role: Lead UX Designer
at DigitasLBi
Team: Art Direction, Lead Graphic Design
Being first to market has its challenges. One of the biggest is setting your own conventions and discovering how to make a brand-new product concept easy to use.
Veritas Genetics was the first company to offer full genome sequencing for under $1K, and with that a mobile application that could give its users full insight into their genetics, right in the palm of their hand.
While Veritas was working on an initial release of their app, they were also aware that there were still many other features that could be included, and multiple user touchpoints that could be leveraged, at a later date. Journey mapping helped Veritas visualize their users a path from waitlist to app on-boarding and beyond, providing valuable insight into where Veritas could engage consumers, even before they download the app.
At key touchpoints, ideas for potential user engagement and communication were considered and documented.
The main user workflows and functionality were planned at the beginning of the project. We explored the information that would be available to users and how to best present it.
Veritas wanted to explore an energetic identity reminiscent of fitness and lifestyle companies. The visual brand need to also convey high-end product, and be flexible enough to present both serious medical information and lighter, interesting factoids.
My role: UX Designer at DigitasLBi
Team: UX/Creative Director, UX Lead Designers, Visual Designers, Business Analysts, and Project Managers
Bank of America wanted to create budgeting tools to help its customers understand their spending habits and find ways to make better financial decisions day-to-day.
Most people want to spend less, but figuring out where to start saving can be a challenge. Bank of America provides its customers with spending analysis and budgeting tools, right in their online account.
These tools let you see what categories you’re spending on, and helps find ways to cut costs. Most importantly, information is presented in an understandable, human way.
To create the budgeting tool, we needed to understand how people were using their accounts. Based on the data we had about the bank’s users, we created three high-level user journeys for representative user groups. These let us see when and why users were logging into their online banking accounts, and helped the team brainstorm new functionality that would be the most useful.
The budgeting tool visual design needed to be clean and inviting: financials can already be a daunting subject and we didn’t want to freak anyone out. Large, colorful graphics highlighted important basic information, with easy ways for users to dig in further.
Once the visual comps were in good shape, we used an Invision prototype to test on usertesting.com. We wanted to get users’ overall impressions, and gauge their ability to navigate our workflows. Overall, users enjoyed the tools and found them easy to use!
One of the goals of the project was to bring helpful articles from Bank of America’s education site, Better Money Habits, into user accounts. We did this by creating ‘insights’ based on the user’s spending habits that would provide links to Better Money Habits articles if relevant.
We defined logic for the insights by gathering the different data points we could get on user spending, consulting with tech people to find out what was feasible, and considering what information from this we could provide to users that would be helpful.
These insights were broken down by user action. The most common actions were awareness (no immediate action, but helps the user understand their spending habits), set a budget, or save a surplus from a budgeted category. This allowed us to choose with which insights Better Money Habits content would be most relevant.
The budgeting tools launched in 2017 in the Bank of America app and on the online banking website.
