I want to make workplace tools less work.
Most of the projects I've worked in my professional career are for people to use while working at their jobs. A few things I love about it:
- Diving deep into entirely new subject areas.
- Getting feedback from an extremely committed -- and often highly vocal! -- user base.
- The added dynamics of working with salespeople to sell the product to buyers.
- The opportunity to relieve workplace stress!
Sample Projects
Mapping the retail purchasing industry
For our capstone project at Carnegie Mellon, my team was tasked to design the MVP version of a startup's new retail purchasing platform. After an initial literature review, we met with a professor at the Tepper School of Business to conduct a stakeholder mapping exercise. That session, along with several user interviews, led to a flow model that we used as a reference diagram during the rest of the project.
User testing a redesign of a legacy tool
At Think Company, I redesigned a citation analysis tool for research librarians. For each module we redesigned, we conducted user testing with 3 - 6 current users. I loved talking to very vocal, critical users, and hearing their enthusiasm when they see designs they're surprised to like.
“Sometimes tools go through such radical changes that you’re like ‘uh oh’, but I don’t feel that way — there’s enough familiarity here that I’m like ‘oh it’s changed!’ but I can still be productive.”
“There’s no functionality that I’d use that I’d wonder where it went, nothing I’ve seen in the past that would be better than this!”
Providing Sales support at a tradeshow
At DrFirst, I worked on a mobile medication prescribing app, and the Sales team wanted to demo the tool at an fast-approaching Health IT tradeshow. I created a 'sales demo cheat sheet' packet to support the Sales team in their efforts to find sales partnerships for the new product. Given the partners' interests, I made sure to provide lots of information on integration points and release timing. See full case study.
Conducting a heuristic evaluation
I believe that great UX is in the details -- those little moments of delight, and conversely those little moments of irritation that can add up to a mountain of frustration. For my application to graduate school, I conducted a heuristic evaluation of a pay-tracking tool that frustrated me every time I used it.
I find this gif from http://uxreactions.com/ hilarious, though I don't agree with the sentiment.