My Formula for Success

We’ve all heard of the Design Thinking process created by David Kelley of Stanford and IDEO. I built upon this well-known structure to apply my own findings.

Not all projects go well — what’s the deal? Is there a secret sauce to successful teams?

Yes! It takes everyone moving in the same direction, taking on manageable chunks of work that will deliver on customer needs. If your team can’t commit to solving one problem from start to finish, you might need to communicate the cost of redirection for both the business and customers. If your team feels like all customer problems are equally important, you might need more data to prioritize them. If your team isn’t delivering value at a faster rate, you might need to reduce projects into smaller chunks.

1. Gather critical data

Discover and Empathize

Stakeholder Engagement: Begin by understanding the business objectives and aligning with key stakeholders.
User Research: Conduct in-depth qualitative and quantitative research to understand user needs, pain points, and behaviors.
Data Triangulation: Combine insights from interviews, surveys, analytics, and existing databases to form a holistic view.

2. Pinpoint the problem

Define and Align

Problem Framing: Clearly define the problem space, ensuring it resonates with both business and user needs.
Personas & Journey Mapping: Create or refine personas and journey maps that are well-tested and reflect current user behaviors.
Stakeholder Workshops: Facilitate sessions to align on the problem definition, ensuring all voices are heard.

3. Explore solution routes

Ideate and Explore

Divergent Thinking: Use the Double Diamond approach to explore a wide range of ideas, fostering creativity and innovation.
Prioritization: Work with cross-functional teams to prioritize ideas based on impact, feasibility, and alignment with business goals.

4. Follow the path & execute

Prototype and Validate

Rapid Prototyping: Develop low-fidelity prototypes to quickly test assumptions and iterate based on user feedback.
User Testing: Conduct usability tests to validate solutions, focusing on critical pain points and areas of improvement.
Data-Driven Iteration: Use both qualitative and quantitative data to refine prototypes, ensuring they meet user needs and business objectives.

5. Share findings regularly

Implement and Share

Agile Development: Collaborate closely with development teams using Agile methodologies, ensuring continuous feedback loops.
Design System Maintenance: Maintain and update a consistent design system with reusable components.
Documentation & Knowledge Sharing: Share findings through playbooks, presentations, and updated personas. Build a research repository that is easily searchable and accessible to all stakeholders.

6. Excel as individuals & teams

Reflect and Grow

Retrospectives: Regularly conduct retrospectives to reflect on what worked and what didn’t, fostering a growth mindset.
Team Coaching: Mentor and coach team members to surface critical issues, be force multipliers, and continuously improve their craft.
Continuous Learning: Stay curious and committed to learning, embracing failures as opportunities for growth.

Resume

Mission

With a BFA in Design and Interactive Media, a UX Certificate from the Nielsen Norman Group, and 14 years of design experience, I'm committed to elevating the user experience.

I specialize in gathering data, researching customer use cases, and building complex user flows. I can define problems based on user insights and create a vision that aligns user needs with business goals.

Years of Experience

• Over 14 years of overall design experience.

• Over 6 years working on large-scale marketing websites and SaaS products in the UX design specialty.

• Over 2 years of people management and lead duties including design process definition.

Accomplishments

• Designed all-new, highly adopted features including tags, notes, and saved views with 76-79% adoption. Conducted user interviews, built journey maps, synthesized research, framed problems, and completed high-fi designs. Stickiness measure of DAU/MAU: 24%.

• Conducted generative research interviews with customers, built user archetypes, and developed a strategic company vision to support the different user roles and their goals.

• Led an internal redesign of a marketing website (Sophia.org). Created customer journeys, wireframes, style tiles, high-fidelity designs, and a scalable design system.

• Assisted with an agency-led redesign of a marketing website (Strayer.edu) including a scalable design system.

Tools

I'm proficient with tools like Figma, Miro, ChatGPT, and the Adobe Creative Suite.

I gather customer data from tools like Gong, Google Analytics, ZenDesk, ChurnZero, Database Queries, and UserInterviews.com.

SKILLS