SchoolBot: Bus-Tracking App

tl;dr

Taking previously-developed IP from a data-first approach to a human-first one A.K.A., it’s not about the bus!

challenges

• MVP was developed in less than a month, and gave parents direct access to the GPS locations of their children’s school busses, BUT didn’t include exploration of the full context and needs surrounding pick-up and drop-off
• Identify and engage previously overlooked user groups: school admins, non-English speakers, non-parental caregivers

then what?

• General research into morning rituals – what defines a good morning? A bad one? Afternoons?
• Outline a more nuanced list of users; assemble and prioritize giant list of assumptions to test
• Out-of-category research into push/pull content consumption expectations – do users want to information-seek, or receive txt notifications?
• Connect with parents using MVP for feedback, in-home observation
• Connect with districts, & compare them. What’s the same, what’s different?
• Assemble a sequence of events/expectations for districts ramping on to SchoolBot

Visual Merchandising Management Software: Product Design

tl;dr

Making enterprise software that doesn’t suck, AND fosters play for its visual, creative users. 

challenges

• Disrupt a historically feature-first / take-out-menu product development culture
• Visual merchandising management workflows are very dense
• Accommodate post-MVP audience scaling – just because the org financing MVP has three different employees for three different workflows, doesn’t mean that another org won’t have one person responsible for all three workflows

then what?

• Deconstruct why users kept reverting back to Excel, Powerpoint as a band-aid (mere exposure effect? common language across roles?)
• Out of category research into experiences that supported play (character building tools within RPGs, car customization experiences)
• Weekly UX workshops with SME team & stakeholders
• User stories, flows and wireframes all created within google slides for collaborative iteration with project group
• Identify different data visualization views that can provide a unified experience for a single user undertaking multiple workflows, or can toggle to afford appropriately different experiences for users looking for different densities, balances of information

Global Design & Innovation Consultancy: Brand Site

tl;dr

Designing design for designers. How does the internet listen? Can browsing feel conversational? What is the future for design/design methods? What's beyond the stickies?

challenges

• Browsing the website (static, generic, siloed) didn't feel like what it feels like to engage with the consultancy in person (user-centered, good listeners, relevant back and forth).
• Evolving new business model: away from referrals and outside of their existing network.
• Represent the gamut of concept-to-build services to an equally expansive set of client industries without pigeon-holing consultancy sub-groups OR clients. How do we balance serving users relevant content while also facilitating exploration and cross-pollinating adjacent services?
• Sub-plot: the project itself is also a vehicle for the company to see and understand itself in its new post-reorg form.

then what?

• Immersion! Working on-site at their Needham office twice a week. Observing and engaging.
• Using their tools – creative play to uncover key narratives and understand the shape and dynamic of the consultancy’s communication patterns.
• Immediate experimentation and prototyping of conceptual interaction and navigation patterns – starting with how interview assets were stored/explored/shared.
• Creation of a living document, a low-fidelity, high-strategy pattern guide, to facilitate conversations with stakeholders, developers, employees, partners

Volvo : Dealer App

WHAT PEOPLE DO:

The car-buyer spends ~8 hours researching her car online before she heads to the dealership. As a result, she sees the dealer as an obstacle in the purchase process, instead of as an asset.

The industry needs to define a new role for the showroom associate, allowing them to give more value during the shopping process.

Operations weren't helping to bridge this divide. The sales tool currently available to dealers is far from consumer-friendly: content is organized by individual car feature, and is conveyed through dense, highly-technical text and long-form videos that aren't suited for on-floor co-viewing. We also noticed that dealers tended to attack the sell by working from the car/promotion out instead of from the consumer out, turning what could be a personal exchange into a templated one.

WHAT WE PROPOSED:

Arm the dealer with exclusive (but customer-facing) iPad experience that easily surfaces content relevant to the customer, and relevant to the stage of the purchase process. After visiting several dealerships and walking through the purchase process, we created a customer journey to work against. 

Next, we performed an exhaustive content audit of the dealer and consumer-facing sites, and set about mining it for user-centered themes.

Once we’d identified overarching stories that were more relevant to users, e.g. avoiding collisions in the city, we set up a content structure that allowed for a few layers of depth: themes, stories, and suites. We then prioritized each story and content type against our three phases of dealer interaction from our customer journey: introduction, test-drive, and customization. What we ended up with was a tool that provided valuable data to the end user without breaking the flow of natural conversation, and that could be easily packaged up into a personalized take-away for the consumer.

This project was a huge learning experience for me, personally. Over the course of a few months, I went from being a non-car owner (who hadn't driven a car in over 7 years), to being totally and completely immersed in the MY14 Volvos from a dealer and consumer perspective. It was a steep learning curve, but a totally fun challenge.

Climate Reality Project : Reality Drop

WHAT PEOPLE DO:

If you haven’t noticed, there is a lot of confusion about climate science out there.  People that acknowledge climate change and believe the real science were responding individually to online to articles and comment threads where false science facts were being seeded. The problem with this was that if you were undecided, false science usually outweighs the facts in these comment threads, because there are so many non-believers attacking articles.  The seeds of doubt were still being planted.   

WHAT WE PROPOSED:

Attack the problem where it lives - give dormant climate change activists the scientific ammo they needed to go out and balance the comment threads on environmentally-related articles.  When we developed the Reality Drop functionality, the notion that slacktivism was, in this case, the answer helped us ask people for exactly the right amount of effort.  Adding a leaderboard and scores gave our power-users motivation to keep returning and playing.  And it's working - the average return visitor is on the site for a whopping 17 minutes and 42 seconds.

We designed Reality Drop from scratch, and for a newish brand that had never touched the product space. It presented an exciting and refreshing opportunity, especially at an agency that typically engages legacy brands. In many ways, we saw our brand/client not as Climate Reality, but as SCIENCE. We began with a more wiki/educational approach - our main stories were the climate denial myths, and the villains that perpetrated them. We quickly realized we needed to change tack if our desired outcome was action. We looked to news sites like Huffington Post and Mashable for patterns around how people engaged with news, and to social platforms like Twitter and Pinterest as always-on environments that users ambiently engaged with.

We worked on the product for over a year, and, through a series of betas, tested features and appetite (on the front AND the back end CMS). We had two big takeaways. 1) people were getting a fractured/disorienting experience when we bounced them from our card to the news source. 2) Users were definitely engaging in the right way, copy-and-pasting science, but the system wasn’t adapting to provide different pieces of science to grab, and we were coming off as spammy. Both of these were fun problems to solve. We worked with our dev team to come up with a solution where when users clicked an article card, we gave them the source within a Reality Drop skin - they had access to all the science and tools in the context of the actual article. And a sense of continuity. The spam issue was a more nuanced solve. We explored a system where science nuggets could be retired from an article card once a 5 users had achieved click-backs with it. Then, a related nugget would be drafted into the front of the science queue. We also added copy encouraging users to put science in their own words.

This project was an important one for me. it was a privilege to be part of a team working towards something that lived far outside of the traditional brand/consumer sphere: social change for the greater good.

Reality Drop has been talked about on PSFK and featured on Fast Co.Create.

Reality Drop was awarded a 2013 Andy Awards Bronze, 2013 One Show Interactive Merit, 2013 Webby Awards Honoree, 2013 Montreaux Golden Award,  and a 2013 Addy Awards Silver.

CVS : Drug Information Center

WHAT PEOPLE DO:

Being diagnosed with a diseased is overwhelming. Often, a new patient / caregiver is too overwhelmed and apprehensive to ask her doctor or pharmacist all the questions she has about her prescriptions in the moment. Instead, she tends to turn to Google afterwards, but a vast sea of results makes it difficult to prioritize which articles to read, who to listen to, and essentially, what to worry about. Regardless of where she ends up, drug information pages proved to be universally dense walls of text inaccessible to the layman, and oftentimes triggered more confusion and anxiety than they provided knowledge.

WHAT WE PROPOSED:

Understanding the mental process patients go through when learning about a new drug (and oftentimes, corresponding diagnosis) was crucial to making information more accessible and less scary. As it turns out, context was really what was missing - the facts are presented in a way that pharmacists or lawyers might have felt was best, but is actually wasn’t how a patient needed to digest information. We put CVS' CBM data to work for the end user, bubbling up key pieces of information that might arise in a one-to-one conversation with a doctor, such as which other people like her on are this medication, who's on the generic version, how many users are actually reporting side effects, and what the reported severity is of specific side effects is if/when it pops up.  Thinking about our technology as a proxy for that conversational, human exchange helped us design a solution that was built around the user, not pharma companies.

The desire to understand and feel in control of one’s health spans all ages and levels of education - our visual language needed to be universally intuitive, accessible, and respectful. Our initial sketches actually even visualized a user-centered data display. We quickly abandoned that approach, but maintained the humanity in our narrative and tone. Because we were transitioning from a text-based content approach to one that was more more accessible and visual, a close partnership with visual design was a necessity. This project saw me camped out in our visual designer’s office, sketching and gathering visual inspiration to test and explore together.

This project was particularly meaningful to me because it had the potential to bring individual users something beyond utility, or surprise & delight. This project was about supporting people at their most vulnerable, and I am proud to have been a part of it.

Hotels.com : Ambassador Platform

WHAT PEOPLE DO:

When we plot happiness over time during the trip planning process, there are two dramatically low points: coming home, and  booking. There's a lot of anxiety and uncertainty around booking a hotel, especially one that our user hasn't been to before. Is she getting a good price? Are the reviews trustworthy? Even though there's 50 good ones, that bad one sure is really making her nervous. She visits around 5 sites before committing to book.

We also noticed that booking marked the end of the interaction with hotels.com until they're asked to review the hotel post-visit. These reviews are thorough and plenty - reaching ~200K.

WHAT WE PROPOSED:

Hotels.com is a well-oiled booking machine with a stand-out (if underdeveloped) rewards program, but it was lacking humanity. We wanted to soothe some of that post-booking anxiety by way of hotels.com's vast trove of in-depth community reviews, as well as extend the life of the conversation post-booking. Rather than the confirmation page marking the end of the conversation, we wanted it to mark the start of the trip planning process. We created a rich profile that served as a celebration of our user's travel history, and her engagement with the brand. We seeded more opportunities for the already engaged user base to engage further - location recommendations. This allowed the brand to expand the definition of a hotel's perceived value beyond the footprint of the hotel. We were allowing the community to help our user "become a local faster" and rewarding all parties for participating.

Because this project was created for a pitch, we were operating within a very short timeframe and without traditional project management resources. In many ways, this was freeing. It allowed for the entire project to be UX lead, and operated under a small core team of myself, a UX intern, a visual designer, and digital strategist. By necessity, we skipped the traditional wireframing process. Instead, we took over a breakout room, and collaboratively whiteboarded our way to a prototype. We would have 2 hour worksessions, and then break to do design pattern research on shared pinterest boards, scour travel message boards, and test the competitor’s product/services, and then repeat. The product saw a fast, but rewarding, evolution.

As a Quantified Self nerd, this project was an exciting opportunity to transform mass data into relevant personal stories and insights.

American Eagle : Favorites

WHAT PEOPLE DO: 

Kids don't always have the money to buy, but they're always browsing - and often do so in groups. What they look at and like is a part of how they create an identity.  They are social fiends. They thrive on platforms like instagram that have a small but ownable creative input and a big public/social feedback response.

The existing Wishlist platform for American Eagle was user-facing only, and sharable only by email. It saw high usage only during holidays, when kids were likely just adding items to the list and sending to parents.

WHAT WE PROPOSED:

Harness currently wasted eyeballs and time-on-site and provide an easy outlet for our kid to create, scope and share her style. Move content prompt away from holiday-centric wishlists and into everyday looks - e.g. "weekend netflix marathon" "hoodie season" "date night" etc.

To build Favorites right, we engaged in frequent worksessions with our clients on-site.  We also immersed ourselves in the other platforms our kid was using, since their expectations are set by technology - what functionality appealed to them on platforms like Pinterest, lookbook.nu, Polyvore, and how should we bring technological norms and appealing features into the list?

We also explored the idea of making this platform the user’s aeo.com identity epicenter - a public place where she could start to build, and be rewarded for, her reputation. The product was also versatile enough to be able to support the brand’s fierce cycle of campaigns, while being able to hold its own as a campaign-agnostic evergreen platform.

AEO's competitors pretty uniformly foster a culture of sameness and "fitting in" - I found the opportunity to take a different path to be a really rewarding one. Between Favorites, and its sibling, the Project Live Your Life contest, we were able to give kids a platform to do their own thing, and to reward them for it. Using brand powers for good instead of evil, especially in the teenage retail market, felt like a million bucks.