Embedded Files
20+ years as a creative leader with 15 of those in digital design and creative direction. Player/coach in small to medium teams and heavy experience with large enterprise clients and complex digital frameworks such as ATS systems, internal employee websites, regulated sector products and career sites. From planning video content to designing chatbots and help desks to a Power BI dashboard, clients and internal stakeholders have come to me to ask, “How do we do this?” UX, as with a brand strategy, is my planning phase that is pre-design but significantly aided by my broader experience as a visual designer for digital and interactive spaces.
Toolkit: approaches and experiences
Process & apps
Figma, Miro, InVision, Adobe xD and Creative Suite, BugHerd, HotJar, management apps including Monday, Asana, Basecamp, + AI tools for insights and ideation around finding and solving targeted audience interaction habits, challenges, motivations
User focus: empathy maps, persona development, co-creation workshops, prototyping (such as interactive wireframing) and user testing
Agility and iteration: storyboarding, sketch sessions, sprints and other early iterative processes
Mood and style boards to show design intent (with a tighter timeline I would do “enhanced wireframes” in Figma to speed decision making)
Practices
Taxonomy: my writing and strategy skills are useful in creating language frameworks that aid usability, accessibility, non-bias and much more—“UX writing” is one of the more overlooked quality drivers in my view
Objective-based strategies and design briefs: synthesizing all stakeholder expected value and goals, including metrics/KPIs, into the design brief and, as a design lead, articulating the brief to both product owners and downstream to designers and implementation team/developers
Hierarchy: an important consideration of both visual and message hierarchy based on user context insights + business and digital product objectives; helps in goals achievement, conversion, user efficiency and more
Mobile-first and responsive design have long been a leading UX design principle
Key principles
User-centered or human-centered design; design thinking: my general approach is an insights and persona based strategic approach, similar to a brand strategy or product strategy approach
Anticipatory design: thinking which maps from user intentions with the goal of reducing unnecessary user choices in process
Co-creation: taken from my brand and CPG experience applicable in UX (example would be a co-working group of HR managers on an analytics dashboard)
Localization: many of my clients were global and needed multi-cultural, multi-lingual approaches
People leadership
Managed teams live and virtual, from two inside an agency to 15 + contractors in five countries including India, Mexico, Poland, UK and USA
Intentionally built diverse design teams to help address diverse user and media audience in a more relevant way
Used third party contractors in EMEA, APAC, LATAM to co-create conceptual directions for localization; not just translation but "trans-creation"
Built from-scratch design teams in two agency experiences, the latest being an fully capable, international team serving Fortune 100s with a full menu of 95% digital products including websites, social content, programmatic advertising and event support; weaned my company off a $1M annual agency outlay to 99% staff work with a small percentage to freelance designers
As an executive CD, I led strategists, technologists as well as designers, writers and digital creators, and partnered with many outside technology partners to implement new products for our clients and bring them to life through UX, design, copy, plus any studio content production such as video, animation, photography.
Products delivered
B2C and B2B external websites (including ongoing design improvements based on analytics and other testing such as heat mapping)
B2C and B2B external microsites and landing pages (aligned with paid or organic digital campaign CTAs)
Internal websites
Chatbot and help desk product design
Career site job boards, including user journey and reducing friction between a site platform and a third party ATS
Performance dashboard for Power BI
Interactive video: mapping out users' interactive decision journeys based on user personas, and creating a video concept and storyboard to support it
Experiences summary
Chick-fil-a
Helped Chick-fil-a web product owners envision new careers page design based on a recent change in their website platform and ATS.
Avanade
Helped Avanade with UX thinking and preliminary designs to meet several needs: new brand guidelines and implementation of a new ATS, and the goal of transforming the interface and features in their job descriptions.
Meritrust Bank
Complete site revamp for Meritrust Bank. Using "anticipatory design" the site was based on key user personas and mapping them to most relevant products. Icon design, original photography, WebGL animation. More
Synchrony grad site
Objective was to have a specific, custom website for employees to explore career path options and improve internal mobility. My role was planning, wireframes, all copy and some content design. More
Atos interactive video
Interactive video UX planning, design and writing for Atos. I designed all the interactive elements for the video as well. Developed the story concept as well as the branches based on four targeted tech worker personas. More
McDonald's kiosk
Planned UX, icon sets and other interactive features, video content, web animations and did all writing for a custom kiosk experience for McDonald's franchise operators at their major conference in Orlando. More
Volvo Trucks merchandise
Innnovative brand merchandising site and campaign. I provided the general direction and oversaw UX and digital design. Video, social, print, web. More
Morgan Stanley grad fest
Morgan Stanley had been holding live grad events at venues such as London's Tate Modern, but had to sift to virtual in 2020. We came up with a number of concepts for them to consider. My role was CD, I also drove one of the concepts through design and writing, then I led execution of the final concept on the selected tech platform, Meet & Engage. UX, writing, design direction.
Merck MSD
Another website for a regulated and global business. Career site creation in Phenom People as well as many landing pages for bespoke audiences to align with marketing campaigns. I also used co-creation with decision makers in facilities around the world to come up with a customizable-yet-formatted location page strategy, allowing a degree of necessary flexibility but also achieving efficiency and brand adherance through standardization. More
AMS careers site
Helped my most recent employer re-design their entire careers section of their Wordpress site, including UX challenges in user-profile creation, search and internal user/referral activity.
NASCAR Roush Fenway
Comprehensive digital sales tool for sponsorship marketing. This was a first for NASCAR, done for the Roush Fenway Racing team. I used a large volume of insights about Fortune 500 brand prospects and how they purchased sports sponsorship and crossed that with RFR's offerings on track, on the car and in hospitality, and devised user tools such as interactive maps and mini case studies to help RFR pitch better. More
Volvo Penta e-book
Digital interactive book to help salespeople understand the new Volvo Penta Forward Drive propulsion system. Chapters for features and benefits. My role was to plan the interactive experience, navigation, content, write and design it. More
Marriott franchise services
Helped plan various digital interactive for franchise hotel owners to interact and find Marriott corporate and third party technology services. Internal properties. UX considerations for: new product introduction, account set up, resources search interactions, email engagement and CTAs; UX planning, writing, design to Marriott's brand standards.
Anglo American
Designed a custom DAM (digital asset manager) interface for their three-brand toolkit based on the Papirfly platform.
Tedor Pharmaceutical
Tedor needed a full rebrand and B2B site design for their contract drug manufacturing business. I used their business objectives and audience insights to craft their brand positioning and key messages, then UX, wireframes and wrote the site. Design direction as well. More
Bristol-Myers Squibb
Prototype design for a Power BI and project management dashboard.
Synchrony internal site
Objective was to have a specific, custom website for employees to explore career path options and improve internal mobility. My role was planning, wireframes, all copy and some content design. More
Goodsnitch ratings app
Goodsnitch was a new app looking for their next funding stage and my agency did the MVP and promotions. I helped with UX design and an explainer video.
LHC Group
LHC (United Healthcare) was moving to a new site platform and needed full planning, UX, design and content. Because I was also leading their brand advertising effort, I aligned key principles into interactive design, messaging and introduced web typography animations via .json, a first for the ICIMS platform. More
Mack sales training
E-book for Mack Trucks sales training for their new refuse product. Full interactive planning, writing, production. I used Adobe to design everything and export as an ePub file specifically for Apple products, such as their iPad, but I also created an exact duplicate to be functional as an interactive PDF for non-iOS products.
MassMutual chatbot design
Exploration, brief and strategy for chatbot person design to meet certain persona attributes aligned to the company brand. Explored personality, physical features, accessiblity, gender and TOV and created a brief with recommendations.
Report abuse