Roles
User Research | UX Design | User Interface Design

Goal
Improve and expand the user experience for Analysis and Voice, cloud-based, self-service explanatory analytics applications that gives marketers a way to identify consumer data that drives business performance. The application’s explorable, drillable interface reveals not just what drives revenue but also with whom and why. 

Approach
Worked closely with the Product Manager and other stakeholders including the VP of Product in understanding and documenting pain points and opportunities for improvement. Conducted interviews and research which led to the creation of personas/user scenarios to help guide development. Development of a versatile product architecture to allow users to have a more frictionless experience between our suite of apps. Creation of dev-ready specs.

Results
When first released to the public, Analysis was seen as an incredibly powerful and robust tool yet simple to use with minimal training. Through developing a close relationship with early adaptors, we further identified usability issues, application deficiencies, and wish lists which are presently going through constant iteration cycles for improvement.

Roles
User Research | UX Design | User Interface Design | Visual Design

Goal
Sgrouples asked me to re-imagine the architecture, user interface and visual design for the web and iOS versions of their MeWe Social Media app.

Approach
MeWe is an extremely feature-rich platform with many tools and functions to serve the diverse needs of its user base. These include a user's personal feed, group feeds, chat, group chats, cloud photo and media storage, and even event planning and distribution among others. All these features and functions in a mobile app if not done right could lead to a disastrous user experience. 

The goal was to concentrate on the more common user journeys to ensure the user, especially mobile-only users, could perform all the necessary functions that MeWe had to offer while still keeping it simple, intuitive, and fun.  

The focus was placed on quick and pleasurable access to the latest content a user wants to see, keeping navigational affordances to a minimum. We wanted the user to see the content, not the tools.

Also on offer was a simple but flexible color palette and a subtle state-transition pattern was also recommended to help aid the user in understanding their present location in the app better.

Roles
User Research | UX Design | User Interface Design | Visual Design

Goal
MeWe, a social networking site, requested help in improving their onboarding experience for both desktop and mobile (Android and iOS). They wanted to develop an easy and fun way to teach a new user how to use as well as enjoy all the features MeWe had to offer. There was also further motivation from the stakeholders to try to hasten the users investment in MeWe by nudging them via these onboarding posts to invite contacts and/or to join groups as soon as possible. Lastly, there was also a need to remedy the undesirable effect of having a new user encounter a social media feed that was devoid of any content. A very unpleasant experience. 

Approach
Rather than using a Wizard or a Tool Tips approach we opted to play to our advantages which was the wonderful communication device already built into the system; the user’s post feed. The idea was to pre-populate the feed with a couple welcome and instructional posts to get the user acquainted with the interface and to help motivate them to invite some friends during their initial visit.  

From there we built in an automated mechanism that would have a new post from MeWe enter their feed, one a day, for 2 days (we kept the initial number of posts to just a few until we could accumulate some user reaction feedback). The content of these posts were dependant on the actions the user had taken up to this point and included such pro-active action requests such as creating a group and inviting friends via Facebook. As a user coming into MeWe would be coming in from a few different scenarios (new first time user/new user invited by a friend/new user invited by a group, etc.), it was important to be able to personalise these introductory posts as well as any continuing posts to the users precise scenario. This involved creating a detailed Spreadsheet for the developers outlining the different posts available and when and where they were to be released. We also added an automated MeWe response for when a user commented on one of our automated posts for the first time.

We wanted to ensure these posts would not only be educational but also a fun experience as they would be the first impression MeWe made with the user so enter our new MeWe mascot, the happy Earth, drawn by yours truly. This character helped liven up otherwise text-only posts, was flexible enough to be used for a variety of needs (onboarding, branding, external communications, etc.) and had the added benefit of helping grow the MeWe brand's personality in a fun direction.

Result
The result was a more engaging and ultimately more sticky experience for the new MeWe user.  

Roles
User Research | UX Design | User Interface Design | Visual Design

Goal
The users of our Enterprise Authoring Software came to us with a problem. They had found that they were in great need of a much more powerful production and communication tool built into our software than was presently available. The Notes feature that was originally built into our product afforded the user the ability to post a note, comment on a note, and change the status of a note to 'closed' but it appeared that with the large amount of users and iterations involved in a product of the magnitude that higher education content required, we needed to create something with a lot more capability. To do this, I needed to first investigate and find exactly what those needs were. 

Methodology
The first step was to interview the users to see exactly what their current pain points and intended goals were. This proved to be quite an undertaking as there were numerous user roles per a project; from authors to editors, through to project managers, quality assurance teams, and administrators. Many of their tasks and needs over-lapped but some had very specific requirements that at times appeared to contradict one another's needs.

I was sure to interview at least a couple of users from each of the relevant roles and whenever the opportunity presented itself I would sit through a session to watch the users performing their daily tasks and their interactions with our notes tool.

After my initial fact-finding was complete, I tabulated my notes into a spreadsheet. I then removed any duplication of goals or problems and proceeded to consolidate and categorise the remaining comments. From there, the data was studied to gain a much clearer understanding of what was required from this tool to meet (and hopefully exceed) our many user's needs.

Results
Next, after brainstorming and scribbling of possible best solutions, wireframes were created and presented to the stakeholders for validation to ensure that what we intended to build would hit the mark, and if not, feedback on what goals still were not being met.

These wireframes, with any necessary supporting documentation and assets, were then turned into clear User Stories and further categorised into Epics to then build our Sprint strategy around.

Roles
User Research | UX Design | User Interface Design | Visual Design

Goal
To create a highly interactive content authoring, workflow, and distribution SaaS Edutech platform designed for the education and e-Learning fields.

Role
As the Senior UX Designer reporting directly to the VP of Product Development, contributed to all facets of the development. 

Responsibilities included product definition through direct interaction with clients, stakeholders, and/or product managers, wire-framing, developing of user stories, working closely with engineering, validating product build, and consolidating and implementing user feedback.

Roles
UX Design | User Interface Design | Visual Design

Goal
An internal tool to allow fellow employees the ability to submit suggestions anonymously to a company-public forum that can be viewed by their coworkers. Users can then up-vote (and in later iterations comment) on these suggestions. Internal stakeholders can then use this information to address issues or improvements.

Product traction, or 'success', was based off monitoring user adoption.

Approach
We decided upon an anonymous suggestion feed as inspired by such products as Yik Yak. This feed would allow users to view and upvote suggestions they agree with so that the suggestions with the most interest would be addressed by company stakeholders. 

We also built in admin abilities that would allow prohibitive or aged messages to be deleted as well as the ability to view private massages.

Results

Proved to be so successful that it became the primary source of feed-back for the company used by the internal staff. We continued to develop new features based off continual user feedback.

Roles
User Research | UX Design | User Interface Design | Visual Design

Goals
To redesign the user experience and user interface of the Lion's Heart volunteer portal and sign-up experience.

Lion's Heart is a wonderful non-profit Organization that offers a platform for teens to find and track volunteer opportunities. I was tasked with specifically improving the onboarding/sign-up funnel for new users which at that point was seeing a significant drop-off as well as the volunteer's portal page experience.

Approach
I worked closely with the wonderful team at Lion's Heart in uncovering how their user's used the product, what the goals and motivations of the Lion's Heart Organization were as well as their users. From there I developed a priority roadmap and created (and iterated on) a few wireframe and visual design options showing some possible strategies for success. 

Results
We had great success with the redesign with the sign-up funnel going from 7 busy screens to 2 simple screens with a 40% Year-over-Year increase in users completing the sign-up flow.

Roles
User Research | UX Design | User Interface Design | Visual Design

Goal
A distinct feature of the Chaucer content authoring platform is the ability for content creators to use interactive elements (called widgets) to create dynamic experiences to help articulate concepts as well as to offer a fully functional assessment environment. 

Approach
Working closely with our clients as well as our internal Instructional Design Team, we defined and developed a consistently expanding line of interactive types that can help address the diverse pedagogical needs of the Edutech community. Each of these widgets would need to have an extremely user friendly authoring environment. They would also need to include a fully responsive behavior for use on all devices, from desktop to mobile. 

I ensured each widget’s goals were clearly defined, wireframes were built and shared, necessary iterations were done, and prototypes were built for testing. As each widget type was released, I kept in close communication with our Customer Success team who would speak to our clients on a daily basis to ensure any and all feedback regarding widget deficiencies or requests for additional features were addressed.

A living style guide was also concurrently created to ensure that these very diverse group of interactives retained a common functionality and UI pattern language to give the entire line of interactives a strong sense of continuity and familiarity.

Results

Chaucer users are now offered an extensive line of interactive teaching and assessment aids to better teach and delight their student base. At present there are over two dozen of these interactives such as Media Galleries, Graph Builders, Interactive Map Creators, Multitrack Timeliness, Drag and Drop Assessments, Audio Line Readers, Adaptive Scenarios, Interactive Walk-Throughs, Document Library Creators, and new ones are being added every day.

Roles
UX Design | User Interface Design

Goal
National Geographic Learning came to us hoping to turn their popular line of Grade K through 6 Exploring Science books into fully interactive content with a GUI and touch-screen interface that could be successfully used in either a classroom social setting or by a student studying at home. This new product needed to go above and beyond the original print book version with highly interactive content as a pedagogical aid for learning as well as the inclusion of newly created interactive assessments for each stage of the learning process. 

Approach
To tackle this exciting project, we set up a team of the usual suspects; myself representing the User Experience role; our very talented Design Director for the visual side; our intrepid Instructional Designer for all the pedagogical stuff and of course a Project Manager to keep us all in line. 

The first order of business was the Discovery Phase where we sat with the client for a couple 9-hour days and went through a few titles and brainstormed ideas and blue-sky concepts. We then took this stack of notes away and converted these into what we felt were the 20 best interactives that could be used throughout the line of content in a variety of fruitful ways.

I then went to my UX cave and created wireframes, and with the help of the developers, a few working proof-of-concepts to show the client the value of these interactives as well as how they would function in order to get stockholder buy-in before production commenced.

After any necessary iterations, the wireframes were expanded and modified to create functional specification documents that the developers could use to properly build the products.

As these ePubs had a lot of moving parts, the functionality of these interactives under the numerous states and circumstances they could be involved in had to be spelled out quite precisely so that the developers knew exactly what to build, the client knew what to expect, and both our and the client’s QA departments knew exactly what was considered the correct behaviour. We also needed to ensure that everything in these ePubs conformed to WCAG usability standards in both UX and visual design as stipulated by the California School District's codes of approval.

Lastly, as some of the content would be used by children as young as 6 years old, we had to ensure that the interactivity was appropriate in it's functionality for touch by smaller and less dextrous hands. The Kindergarten version needed to have a much simpler UI which consisted of more obvious interactive elements and larger and simpler touch interfaces.

Results
I believe we were all thrilled with the finished product. It was been since translated into Spanish and last I heard it was up for an award for Best Science Instructional Solution. And the client was given a totally comprehensive 223 page functional spec document for reference/archives.

Goal
Recently I started working with the wonderful non-profit organization, Conversations 4 Good ; a site devoted to matching under-privileged youths with advisees to help these young people define and develop a path to realizing their goals, something that is missing from the few other opportunities afforded them.

My interest in working with this group was primarily to help them in a UX Strategy mold; helping them define and align their non-profit goals with that of the individuals they are hoping to reach and then providing the right tool to accomplish these goals. However, in the process, I had carte blanche to also recommend any fixes I could find in their present SaaS tool (some low hanging fruit so to speak).

What was immediately obvious from using the product was the laborious and cumbersome process the user needed to go through just to sign-up. This was the case for both the advisors and the advisee. Getting the user into the tool as quickly and as seamlessly as possible is fundamental to a young platform looking for new users.

Approach
First, I needed to define what would be needed for the sign-up process and what could be removed (and possible included in a later part of the user's journey). Beyond the expected, there were also requirements exclusive to working with minors that needed to be included. 

Result
A much simplified sign-up process that now only brought the user in to the platform quicker, but by ordering and wording the on-boarding in a certain order, educated the user to the value proposition of the product along the way.