Duration: 5 weeks | Role: Lead Strategist | Team: Sales principal, UX, and technical support

John Deere’s consumer division was struggling to connect and engage with their customers; as a manufacturer, products are sold through dealers and retailers which means Deere doesn’t share a purchasing relationship with the consumers of their products. We were asked to help them define a compelling value proposition for customers to engage directly and digitally with John Deere. Over a six week period, we reviewed existing consumer and technical research, structured and ran a 3-day onsite workshop with 17 participants, synthesized the research to define the key value proposition, and mapped out a pilot program targeting 10 consumers across two different regions to provide more detailed insights for a longer term digital strategy.

Outcome: John Deere was able to secure funding to run the pilot program with their own UX team.

Duration: 2 weeks | Role: Lead Strategist | Team: design support

New product demand brought on by COVID-19 introduced an opportunity to broaden the reach of Gentex’s industrial safety equipment business line. But the sales process for this business unit follows a very different path than government procurement (which makes up a majority of their business), and therefore required a different approach to the sales and marketing process. I was asked to use my opportunity mapping framework to recommend improvements to their sales channel strategy. Over the course of two weeks, I led generative and secondary research and ran a 3 day workshop with key stakeholders to to map out their current process, identify pain points at each stage, and generate ideas for deeper exploration. We were able to narrow the insights down to three potential opportunity paths.

Outcome: Gentex recognized that our recommendation for Strategic Sales Leadership was the best first step. They assembled an internal team to develop a sales playbook based on our findings and recommendations.

Engagement: 6 weeks | Role: Project Lead | Team: UX Lead and Technical Lead

As a retail merchandising company, Footprint has existing technical and resource ecosystems used to support retail properties (B2B). They wanted to explore ways to leverage those capabilities to enter the high end residential retail market. We partnered with Footprint to validate the business opportunity and scope out a potential MVP.

This project involved mapping the current processes and technical ecosystem as well as researching the desired new market space. We did work in business alignment, personas and journey mapping, opportunity validation and risk assessment, and MVP definition.

Outcome: we identified the original business goal as risky; we could not validate a market need in the high end real estate business. We did, however, identify several other opportunities, and were able to scope a very tight MVP in order to do further exploration.

Duration: 1 week | Role: Lead Researcher | Team: N/A

As the Strategic Lead for the Winnebago portfolio, I was asked to jump in and perform some “quick and dirty” (or as I prefer to call it “scrappy, not crappy”) research on RV usage in order to provide some starting points for a design sprint the smart RV team planned to run. As I only had one week to turn around these insights, I recruited from within our organization, and instead of doing a heavy weight discussion guide, I set up a Miro board that served as both discussion guide and provided for rapid synthesis by pre-grouping notes by theme and sentiment.

Outcome: I was able to perform the research, synthesis, and turn around key insights in a week. I identified several helpful themes and key personas the smart RV team used to kick off their design sprint.

Duration: 4 weeks | Role: Lead Researcher | Team: N/A

As often happens at the end of a financial year, Whirlpool CA (Canada) had some UX budget they needed to consume. Based on our ongoing work with them, we recommended they invest in some foundational personas, as that was a missing piece in their current research library. Based on our understanding of the market landscape, I suggested we focus our research on what the industry refers to as “duress” personas: people forced to purchase due to a faulty or broken appliance (these customers make up almost 70% of the market). I recruited and screened participants and interviewed 8 people who had either purchased within the month or were currently in the purchasing process. After formal synthesis, I created a special persona format in Google Slides that they could use for additional future personas. I also pulled all insights into a sortable and searchable Google sheet to serve as a start of an insights library and tagging taxonomy for them.

Outcome: Insights from the persona work have already informed four small projects: the redesign of the home page, more prominent promotion of haul-away and installation services on the product detail pages, improved information on product dimensions, and more financing options.

Duration: 4 weeks | Role: Lead Strategist | Team: UX Researcher & Designer

Candy Crush is likely the most well known and successful mobile game on the market. Looking to increase in-app purchases, King Software was planning to release a physical gift card in time for the 2022 Holiday season. We were asked to perform some rapid insight sprints to inform the design and marketing for the holiday release, and also create a longer term research plan for ongoing improvements. Over the course of 4 weeks we did design and messaging explorations and ran four quantitive tests and two sets of qualitative interviews. We were able to make strong recommendations for the card art work, title language, dollar amount, and marketing messaging.

Outcome: In addition to taking our recommendations on the design of the card itself, we disproved the original hypothesis that card buyers would likely be non-players. Rather, we identified a large opportunity to leverage the community aspect of gaming by marketing player-to-player gifting.

Duration: 6 weeks | Role: Lead Researcher | Team: Creative Lead & Usability Analyst

Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) operates a large number of health care facilities across the United States and Great Britain. As a long time customer of Infor, they were considering moving to a new Talent Management platform. Given the nature and scope of their business, they had some unique requirements for their talent acquisition and succession management processes. I led a small team to better understand their needs and pain points and explore potential enhancements to our talent management platform that would make Infor a compelling partner. We ran a collaborative workshop and two separate site visits to gather data.

Outcome: We were able to land a $2 million new contract with HCA, and put several new features informed by our research onto the product roadmap (and that are now in the product)

Duration: 4 weeks | Role: Project Lead | Team: Senior Designer

As part of ongoing work with Whirlpool Canada, they asked us to reimagine the home page of their direct-to-consumer site. Given the short timeline, I wanted to make sure our different client stakeholders were aligned on the purpose and goals of the project. I started by interviewing key stakeholders and creating a project brief to identify constraints, requirements, and goals. This was particularly important in surfacing some key constraints: no new imagery and no new content. We had to work with what the current asset and content library could support. This provided the guardrails for our design explorations.

I then pulled in a creative/visual designer to partner with me. Together, we reviewed current research from the client (including our own persona research), benchmarked against inspirational and competitor sites, and validated against Baymard’s ecommerce guidelines. Through several rounds of iteration, we finalized two approaches and handed off to the client with recommendations for testing. The client picked one version to test against the current home page and the results were clear: the new design was measurably better in both utility (navigation, clear calls to action, etc.) and positive brand identity.

In addition to designs, we worked closely with the client to establish a clear governance model to maintain the integrity of the updated design. In our project brief, we also identified target metrics to track performance and inform future iterations.

Outcome: While originally planned for the .ca site, the work we did is now being evaluated and considered for inclusion for the entire NA market.

Duration: 8 weeks | Role: Project Director | Team: UX Lead, Designer, Technical Lead, Front End Developer

My role on this project started early; during our quarterly business review with long time client Chamberlain, I was asked to talk about our recent experience work. We ended up spending almost the entire three hours digging into user experience challenges and business goals and left that meeting with a new engagement with Chamberlain.

Chamberlain had a hypothesis they wanted to test out. They felt they weren’t getting enough traction in the commercial space, and wanted to test if creating a dedicated site for commercial customers could improve conversion and engagement metrics.

Aiming to improve this performance, Chamberlain asked us to create a completely new myQ commercial website, separating it from their residential website. I then scoped and estimated the project and gathered the team of designers and developers.

Guided by research from competitive and comparative analysis, we led the development of the structural, content, and visual designs, along with imagery for the new website.

In eight weeks, we successfully delivered a fully functional 11-page website with completely new and distinct visual brand identity and updated content.

Outcome: despite not optimizing for SEO and having significantly reduced content, the new site is performing better than the old site across all engagement metrics. Chamberlain has engaged the team for a second phase to build out the MVP site into a full commercial experience

Duration: 3 months (+2 years across other projects)| Role: Lead Research & Strategist | Team: Creative Lead, Delivery Manager

National Heritage Academy, managing over 80 charter schools, built a custom tool to track student progress and report to parents. However, the rushed development and lack of user research led to a system that was overly complex, under-utilized, and filled with performance issues. We were brought in to redesign both the tool and improve their development process.

Our approach began with workshops to align goals and assumptions. We conducted extensive user research, visiting schools to observe how teachers and deans tracked progress and customized instruction. We learned that the current system didn’t reflect real-world classroom needs, with many teachers working outside the system, causing important data to be lost.

Recognizing the need for both a better tool and a smarter development process, we proposed an true agile approach. Rather than the previous method of delivering a full feature set all at once, we focused on launching a minimal viable product (MVP) with essential features. This allowed us to gather valuable feedback from users early on.

The MVP was released to five pilot schools, enabling close collaboration with users and continuous iteration based on real-world feedback. This agile process not only delivered a more effective tool but also established a sustainable way for the organization to keep learning and improving through software development.

Outcome: In addition to a successful product delivery, the NHA team decided to use this project approach as a template for how to build software. We supported them on three more successful projects and also used those projects to train design thinking/HCD methodologies.

Duration: 12 weeks | Role: Project Lead | Team: 3 designers

Alation is the leading provider of data cataloging solutions. When they reached out to our team, they were reacting to a troubling trend in the market: despite offering the most robust and reliable feature set, they were losing to competitors with a more consumer-like user experience. Alation engaged with our team to accelerate their work on a new design system to modernize their UI and elevate them to best in class in both features and user experience.

We started with stakeholder interviews to clarify constraints and develop a core set of design principles to guide decision making. We then spent considerable time thoughtfully crafting a unique visual brand identify and a high level approach to the user interface that aligned the business goals with those design principles. We then prioritized the most critical and necessary components, created detailed designs and documentation for each, and provided Alation with a foundational design system. Our key stakeholder summed it up like this “we could have never have done this without you.”

Outcome: Alation was able to build out on this foundational design system and is still expanding on it today.

Duration: 6 months: | Role: Product Manager & Principal IA | Team: Creative Director, Information Architect, Design, and Front End

Infor had a problem: a growth strategy based on acquisitions left them with a product catalog that was feature-rich, technically disparate, and lacked any type of cohesion or consistency in the product UX. Previous attempts to address this UX and technical debt had minimal impact, because those efforts failed to take into account the breadth and complexity of the products and product teams we needed to serve, nor was their any clear focus or prioritization of a specific technical platform or approach.

With a renewed organizational focus on UX, my team was tasked to create a more effective and practical design system. This time, we prioritized collaboration with internal stakeholders (both designers and product teams). We started with workshops with designers, who provided invaluable insights into the challenges faced by developers, analysts, and product owners. This user-centered approach allowed the team to identify key pain points and opportunities, leading to a more focused strategy.

We then conducted interviews and performed surveys with developers and product teams to gather additional feedback. This data informed our decision to optimize the design system for the three primary software frameworks, while ensuring other teams could still leverage improvements through .css support. By involving the framework teams in the co-development and testing processes, the design system gained traction and investment from key stakeholders.

Outcome: After launch, 28 development teams adopted the new design system, leading to a 49% improvement in usability. Since that release in 2015, the product design group has continued to expand and evolve the SoHo design system, and it is now part of Infor’s Developer open source community.