ABOUT THE ROLE
Rebuild the user experience design discipline after a previous team was disbanded years prior to my joining the company. The role required not only building and maintaining the expertise, effectiveness, and morale of the team, but also evangelizing the impact and value of user experience design, research, and writing.
Design Management
ROLE: DESIGN MANAGER
I inherited a team of 8 and hired two additional members into the team. Our team recorded consistently high scores on Qualtrics engagement surveys, far outpacing the company and the average of all companies.
A significant deliverable in my role was evangelizing what a UX team can provide, and how it can be best utilized to drive business value.
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I established and enhanced several process and organizational improvements to increase the postiive impact of user experience design and research on the company's product line.
- Postulating a hypothesis for change in user behavior or attitude along with a measurement plan
- Committing to iteration until the desired behavior or attitude outcomes were achieved
- Committing to UX Design sign-off on the release
- Established an intake process vettered by top fiscal controls within the product division
- Established and maintained a sprint backlog and product backlog for user experience design specific instance of Azure Dev Ops
- Established and evangelized weekly critique to improve design quality
- Established and evangelized quarterly design retrospectives to improve design process, leading to significant positive changes in how the product divison engaged with the design disciplines
- Established and maintained a research library built in Confluence allowing researchers to broadly share insights and allowing collaborators to query on previous studies by product, user role, study type, portfolio, and free text
- Organized quarterly presentations to full product division to evangelize contributions of the user experience design disciplines
- Wrote, designed, and presented case study justifying investment in user experience research and design to entire company in December 2023.
Edmentum Design Pattern Library
ROLE: DESIGN MANAGER, DESIGNER
Guided and supported team decision to converge on Figma as our design tool. Created reference variables and code for color based on HSB interpolation of brand color values. Supervised the creation of shared components for buttons, filters, data tables, and form controls in an ongoing effort to bring more brand cohesion across a multiple-product suite.
Elementary Student Research
ROLE: RESEARCHER
As is often the case in corporate mergers, our team was divided on which course navigation model would produce superior performance for students using our courses. I gathered input from proponents of both options, facilitated agreement on evaluation metrics, then defined a research protocol to measure what was agreed to. I recruited a dozen students in the target grades, administered the protocol, uploaded recordings to DoveTail, analyzed the findings, and reported back to the team, allowing us to move beyond the division in viewpoints.
Design Principles
ROLE: MANAGER
This work was from one of my direct reports: David Straight. His mission was to describe and detail the principles upon which user experience design decisions are made. He created this presentation as a precursor to training collaborators on how to make better design decisions, as well as provide some more context regarding how the user experience design team operated.
The creation of this work was also a process that engaged the full experience design team, and helped the team identify opportunities for greater consistency and quality in our design process.