DESIGN THINKING + ENTREPRENEURIAL EXECUTION
As mobile design lead, I use design thinking to drive innovation and influence strategy, plus lean, data-driven methodology to validate and refine to bring high-impact features to market faster.
A CASE STUDY
What I Do
Hybrid Research
I conduct qualitative research to deeply understand our customer and blend quantitative data to bring a strong point of view and accurately frame the problem.
Design Strategy
I combine human-centered insights with business goals to create viable and holistic multi-channel experiences informed by objectives and outcomes.
Creative Direction
I facilitate collaborative problem solving to bring the big-picture vision to life and deliver artifacts like journey maps, wireframes, task flows, service blueprints, and prototypes.
Team Leadership
I direct the efforts of a full-stack team by curating design practices and aligning skills, strengths, and interests to both project success and individual career growth,
Influence & Impact
I articulate complex concepts to stakeholders and negotiate with project partners to prioritize pilots that create value and drive products forward.
Digital Transformation
I develop and lead strategic design workshops across the enterprise to guide teams toward a more collaborative, cross-functional, and iterative engagement model.
Empathy Through Ethnographic Research
To gain deep customer empathy, we perform regular field visits to interview and observe small business owners' real world behaviors. This allows us to understand how context influences their experience, and uncover unmet needs that may not have surfaced in a more structured interview format.
RESEARCH & SYNTHESIS
I guide team members in contextual inquiry techniques and observation protocols, then analyze data and usage patterns to compare their actual behavior to what they say and discover opportunities to create value.
End to End Strategy
We map these customer-centric research insights against business goals, as well as competitive analysis and UX audit recommendations to prioritize work for impact. On every level, we focus on the end to end experience allowing users move seamlessly between web, native mobile, and multiple communications channels while considering where specific devices can deliver an enhanced experience.
An Integrated Experience
A journey map to identify gaps and illustrate how a customer can begin a task on one platform, return via messaging, then finish on a more suitable device.
Facilitating Conceptualization
After aligning with product on a focused problem statement, I bring together a cross-functional team of Design, Product, Tech, and relevant stakeholders to explore ideas and identify technical and business constraints. Through a series of working sessions, I facilitate sketching high-level, low-fidelity ideas for broad exploration, synthesizing and validating concepts, and rapid iteration to accelerate the design process.
Whiteboarding Work session
The goal is to first generate ideas and crystalize an ideal user experience, then understand feasibility.
Collaborating with Sprint Teams
As soon as flow concepts are baked enough to communicate intent, I encourage the team to bring wires into pre-grooming sessions for feedback and alignment. This is a deeper dive into technical and enterprise constraints that have not yet surfaced. I drive conversations and use solid judgement to recommend design trade-offs that stay true to the strategic intent while reducing complexity. As we move forward in the design process and raise the level of fidelity, I stay closely in touch with product and tech partners to deliver designs grounded in reality and provide support throughout the build cycle.
To honor my NDA, I can't provide more interaction design details here, but I am a hands-on designer as much as a leader, and regularly produce wireframes, user flows, high-fidelity interactive prototypes, and deliver annotations, assets, and functional specs.
Delivering buildable designs
We deliver pixel perfect annotated screens and design specs within a visual language system, and extend the pattern library with new usage definitions.
Leading Full-Stack Design
As more specialized design team members roll onto a project. I provide creative direction to align researchers, content strategists, interaction, and visual designers on project goals and milestones. This includes effective resourcing by connecting people with differing work and communication styles to improve productivity and build career and skillsets. I develop best practices from a successful on-boarding through formalizing guidelines for designing and delivering.
Prototyping to Success
I partner with creative technologists to prototype ideas at every stage, and evaluate tools based on the need and goals at the time.
for Exploring
Simple, low-fidelity prototypes to quickly gather feedback for rapid iteration.
for Presenting
Interactive, high-fidelity prototypes for communication, approval, and usability testing.
for Handoff
Polished interaction and motion design prototypes for efficient and accurate communication.
Design to Learn
Part of the design delivery is a plan to measure the testable hypothesis and how we will collect and evaluate data to improve. In addition to this metrics-based analysis, usability tests are conducted throughout the design process. For clearly defined tasks, we may choose remote, unmoderated testing, while in-lab, moderated sessions provide more opportunity for discovery and follow-up questions.
Driving Product Development
I take a bird's eye view to connect the dots and bring issues to light early. Using this broad point of view combined with our data learnings, I provide recommendations to influence the product roadmap. I partner with cross-functional team members to constantly refine processes for better collaboration and smoother hand-offs.
