To develop a better understanding of the business and its objectives, I designed a goal-directed, foundational research plan that consisted of interviews with the executive team (for the product vision), clinic staff (for workflow issues and operational challenges), care providers (for patient care issues and subject matter expertise), client services (for health system and customer pain points), digital marketing (for competitive analysis and brand positioning), and the development team (for data structure/integration issues).

Next, I created primary and secondary personas for Care Team users and tasked my team with creating personas for patient portal users; each persona description included demographic info, pain points and vision statements; aspirational, high-level design objectives that my team shared with everyone in the company. This helped us reach a shared understanding of (and empathy for) the providers, health systems and patients that we were trying to serve.

I used the outcome of this research to develop a UX framework and information architecture for the unified application. Creating this matrix of potential user roles and task categories helped the team solidify the structure of the new app, and enabled the dev team to create a scalable, modular data architecture to support these role-based permissions.

The next phase of the Care Team project was to create primary and secondary task flows for each persona, so that we could envision how users would interact with the product to achieve their respective goals.

I worked with the product team to identify the baseline features needed for each key path scenario, and created task flow diagrams to illustrate the decision points and activities in each scenario. These flows helped the design, dev and product teams define the functional requirements for each task.

In order to develop the interaction model and identify which features should appear in each role-based view, I created a series of Balsamiq wireframes and screen flows for key path scenarios including user sign in, patient intake and queues, and patient charts.

Since the web-based application was designed to be responsive, the wireframe layouts were created for mobile, tablet and desktop viewports.

The final phase of this design process was to create WCAG-compliant visual designs and a scalable pattern library. I used Sketch to develop the app's look and feel, and used Zeplin to hand off final design assets and CSS to the development team.

I led an effort to update MyPlan's look and feel from a fixed-width, 1024px layout to one that was fully responsive. I began by examining the site's Google Analytics, which showed an abnormally high bounce rate for the 20% of users who were entering the site on a tablet or smartphone. This research, as well as ad hoc user testing on campus indicated that student users had a sub-optimal experience with the web app on the mobile devices they used most often.

I worked with MyPlan's UX team to identify core tasks and key path scenarios that the web app needed to support, and designed a modular interface and global navigation that would scale as new features were added. After settling on a final UI design, I worked with the dev team to create a phased approach to implementation.

One of the first projects I was asked to lead was the creation of a scheduling and pre-registration system for MyPlan. I began by referring to user research the team had conducted, in order to outline the decision points at which a student would begin the quarterly schedule creation and registration process. Next, I worked with the dev team to identify the available course data that students could use to compare available course offerings and compare possible schedules to find one that would work for them.

After the successful launch of Schedule Builder, I was asked to lead the effort to add registration functionality to MyPlan. By adding quick access to the registration system through Schedule Builder, I helped create an intuitive bridge between finding schedules and signing up for courses.

The goal in redesigning MyPlan’s course search was to help students find the most direct path to the curriculum they were looking for, while improving the speed and accuracy of the feature. I began by gathering information from our target users about how, when, and why they searched for courses. I used this ad hoc research to inform the improvements I recommended, and I worked closely with program managers and the development team to prioritize new and updated pre- and post-search features.

After conducting a series of on-campus user research interviews, I was able to create a comprehensive task flow, identifying users' key decision points when finding courses. The proposed improvements performed well in usability testing, and final designs were well received by campus stakeholders. The redesigned search UI was released prior to Autumn Quarter 2016.

I applied the findings from my user research and completed a redesign of the JetPack UI in less than three weeks. Next, I created a functional prototype based on the original usability test script and conducted a follow-up study to measure the potential impact of the proposed changes. Usability testing results were overwhelmingly positive:

• Successful task completion rate for first-time users improved from 25% to 70%
• Time on task decreased by 66%.
• WCAG compliance was improved to AAA standards throughout the UI.

Design recommendations were also made with the product's ship schedule in mind – detailed functional specifications, UI layouts and a component library were delivered via Zeplin and Azure DevOps, so that front-end development could be completed in just two sprints.

The 2010 Bing smartphone app was one of the first to introduce the concepts of keyword disambiguation and autosuggest. As a Product Designer on the Bing team, my role was to take the functional specs for these new search features and apply Microsoft’s recently-introduced Metro design patterns to create an intuitive and approachable UI for users who had never seen it before.

These comps illustrate a scenario where the Bing app would recognize the word ‘restaurant’ in the search field, and help the user refine their search based on a predefined set of criteria associated with that keyword (e.g. location, price, star rating, etc.).