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Bridge is an employee learning and development platform with the belief that “People Matter Most.” In my role as director, I coach the designers, manage the team, and lead UX and design as a discipline. As a coach I clarify direction, provide context, remove roadblocks, and offer support to each of the designers who report to me. I set team goals, balance responsibilities while playing to strengths of each team member, encourage collaboration among the team, and support individual career growth. I am responsible for measuring the success of my team and determining how we work and what processes we use. I lead hiring and staffing for the team. Every quarter I am heavily involved in planning, prioritizing, and resourcing our next 3 months of work. As we have acquired several additional businesses recently I have been leading design strategy and working with the product team on our company vision in order to align the R&D department on a unified mission.
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As a senior designer I worked alongside several teams of engineers and product managers to make improvements to many parts of the product. Starting at the beginning of projects I would collaborate with engineers to find the right solutions and get their feedback and expertise throughout the design process. I also validated my work through various user testing methods. Additionally, I owned the accessibility and usability initiatives, which included auditing our website, running regular usability studies, updating standards, and providing task lists to engineers. I regularly presented in all hands meetings on the state of our design system and usability studies.
Work Examples & Presentations
Global Navigation / Information architecture Redesign
This project was a collaboration between myself and a product manager named Jane. The entire project took around 6 months as we completed multiple rounds of initial research then usability testing on different iterations of the new navigation. The release of the new navigation was highly coordinated with the customer success, marketing, tech support, and engineering teams. It consisted of a beta release period, during which we captured customer feedback, and overall it was highly successful. One key takeaway for me is how we went about releasing this new design in such a thoughtful way to be as least disruptive to the customers and our business. I always take this into consideration now when designing a potentially disruptive change to a product. It was also a great experience to be able to approach a design problem using research from beginning to end - we had data to back up every decision we made.
Usability Studies with Design Solutions
These usability studies were each conducted when we were planning on working on a set of features and wanted to maximize our efforts by addressing other existing issues while engineering was already going to be working on the code. I wrote the scripts and used userzoom to recruit and run the tests. After the tests were completed I analyzed the data looking for patterns of frustration, confusion, etc. After summarizing my findings I then put together some potential solutions which would still need to be discussed and validated. The purpose of these presentations was to share with product, engineering and leadership what our focus could be in the next quarter and also align everyone on the value of focusing on usability within the product.
Designing a Thoughtful Onboarding Journey
This is a presentation I gave to product leadership on how we could potentially increase engagement and adoption by putting focus on improving our product onboarding experience. I had learned about the Fogg behavior model for building customer habits and could see how we could apply our understanding of what motivates employees at work and combine it with the Fogg behavior model to design a more connected experience for our customers.
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Designing for Neurodiversity at Work
I put this presentation together as part of our design team conference called collabfest. Designing for accessibility was one of our initiatives and while we had talked a lot about accessibility for disabilities like vision impairment we hadn’t explored designing for neurodiversity. Because the product we worked on focuses on employees it made sense to me to think of what we could do within our product to help managers and leaders meet the needs of their employees. This presentation was simply a start to the conversation to highlight why it was something we should consider in our work.
Designing for Neurodiversity at Work.pdf
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Design Team Conference
I am proud of the team culture we had at Bridge under my leadership. We were highly collaborative and ambitious with our pursuit for a better Bridge. I invited our Hungarian teammates to Salt Lake and put together a fun and engaging itinerary for the week. We included members outside our team for different sessions, including front end engineers who we had built a solid relationship with and were always finding new and improved ways to use our combination of skills to progress company initiatives. We also invited members of our customer success and implementation teams and I facilitated a workshop where we built out a service blueprint of the customer onboarding process from first sales contact all the way to when they launched Bridge for their employees. It was a 2 day activity that resulted in some major insights and improvements of how the company guides prospects through the journey to become a Bridge customer.
Working toward frictionless, UX Goals and Vision
UX Screens
Vision
This is a vision presentation to share our plan for improving usability of the product over the next several years.
Graphic Design Examples
I wanted to include some work that is purely graphic design as I think that is one of my strengths. While I can create and follow a pattern library for UX design I also enjoy creating things just for the sake of experimenting with different themes and design styles when I get a chance. The artistic part of UX can get a little stale when you’ve been at the same place for a while so I find this kind of extracurricular work inspiring and a way to maintain my design strengths.