Strategy, ResearchOps & DesignOps
8 Months
Head of User Experience and User Interface
Systems thinking
Researching, testing and implementing workflows
Documentation
Collaboration
Advocacy
Stakeholder interviews and presentations
UX/UI Design
Front-end Dev (SCSS)
Goal
Develop user experience and design strategies, researchOps and designOps processes and workflows as the first UX/UI professional at the company in 5 years and the first member on board the new Product Management team under the VP: Product.
Constraints
Back to School 2025 ("BTS 25") launch needed to happen 8 months from my onboarding at the company
Strategies, processes, procedures and workflows would need to be developed along-side the design work for the BTS 25 launch
Processes and workflows would need to be developed that would allow the ambitious product plans to be realized for BTS 25
Summary
I developed and executed Strategy and Ops frameworks, policies, procedures and workflows that allowed the company to release the largest every BTS launch in a reduced amount of time (in 50% of the usual BTS development runway). Due to the procedures and workflows, that release was the most researched and tested in the history of the company, allowing us to have high confidence that the release was meeting user needs.
30hr per month
Saved in user research analysis
14 Weeks
Reduction in development time across 3 teams
98%
Time saved in image asset creation for educational content
25%
Reduction in UX/UI professional time needed for BTS 26 launch as compared to original budget
100%
Planned UX/UI-related projects delivered on-time for BTS 26
1
Extra project delivered that wasn't in the original plan due to efficiencies in processes
Process
User Experience & Design Strategy
Impact
We were able to create a Back to School 2025 release in 6 months, resulting in far more new work delivered with a cohesive user experience - completely replacing the Admin Center for the portal which wiped out a large portion of the tech debt as it rebuilt services that were on a 25-year old platform.
New work is able to be thought about, designed and delivered with a clear guiding focus for the user experience we're creating and the user needs we're trying to meet.
Problem
There was no over-arching user experience strategy for the product, resulting in a product without a cohesive user experience or guiding principles about how features and flows should be developed.
Solution
I created a single UX Strategy in line with the overall Product Strategy and the company's Business Goals to meet user needs in a more efficient way by utilizing emerging technologies to allow the product to serve as an agent for the teachers rather than an empty notebook into which they organized content for students.
Problem
There were no frameworks within which design work was being done, resulting in a feature-driven ad-hoc design process.
Solution
I created guiding principles and policies for design processes, such as utilizing NNG's 10 Heuristics framework, Task-Based Design processes with Jobs to Be Done, age-appropriate design principles for our K-12 product, etc.
Problem
There was no long term action plan for user experience and UI improvements to the 25-year-old product, resulting in features being prioritized without regard to overall direction for user experience that incorporated other factors such as tech debt, etc.
Solution
I created an 18-month UX/UI action plan based on a thorough current product audit, the engineering department's technical debt roadmap, and the business needs.
ResearchOps
Impact
Decreased time need for user research consolidation, synthesis and analysis by 30 hours per month.
Increased awareness across teams of the data that's driving decisions, leading to increased trust and buy-in cross-functionally.
Problem
User research and feedback was being gathered by multiple user-facing departments across the company, with no way to consolidate them for analysis and trend finding.
Solution
I researched and documented an automated workflow to combine user feedback from various places (Salesforce, Gong, Gainsight, emails, etc.) into one qualitative data repository (Condens).
Problem
When user feedback reached the Product Management team, it was often in the form of a specific feature request without any context, leaving the Product team unable to determine the underlying user need and if that feature request was the best way to meet the user's need.
Solution
I created short and helpful resources for customer-facing teams to learn about how to dig down past a surface user request to the underlying need when they're having conversations to help them provide the Product team with more actionable information.
Problem
Any user research/feedback analysis was done ad-hoc in various tools (Word, Confluence, etc.) with the data available to the person doing the research, preventing socialization of findings and the ability to use research and findings across multiple projects.
Solution
I set up the qualitative data repository (Condens), allowing highlights and findings to be searched cross-project, employing AI-powered features to speed the process of uncovering relevant data points, and providing a self-serve portal where anyone in the company could "ask our users a question" by using AI-powered chat with our data repository.
DesignOps
Impact
Image asset generation time for content was reduced by 98% by using Ai-powered workflows.
Clear documentation and tools made available to the entire organization has increased consistency and decreased time to create customer-facing artifacts and high-fidelity mock-ups.
Clear documentation and creating a Design System and UI kit that are mirror of each other reduced the development time of 3 projects by a total of 14 weeks.
Problem
Image assets used in student-facing content were created by hand, resulting in a small amount of content being able to be created in the 4 month window we had for the 4-8 Digital Citizenship refresh project.
Solution
I researched AI Image Generation tools, selected the best one for our needs, trained it on our content characters as was created a workflow that resulted in 200 asset images being created in a week.
Problem
The front-end was utilizing three UI kits, resulting in cognitive overhead and lost time for development and inconsistent UI for users.
Solution
I designed, tested, iterated and documented a comprehensive Design System that conveyed marketing's desired tone and voice while increasing usability and feelings of the UI being clean, modern and approachable for users.
Problem
Multiple departments had the need to create mock-ups that used our new Design System (marketing, training, etc.) and were recreating the styles in various tools (Powerpoint, Photoshop, etc.)
Solution
I created short tutorials on how to utilize the Design System Component Library in Figma to "drag and drop" components with easy-to-use component properties, allowing anyone in the org (even those totally new to Figma) to be able to quickly created high fidelity mock-ups.
Problem
There was no established workflow from design to development. Developers were recreating visual designs by estimating properties from the visual, resulting in cognitive overhead and lost time for developers, as well as UI built in a variety of ways that is not easy to make broad changes to the styling.
Solution
The Design System Component Library utilizes variables, and I created the SCSS file for the UI kit to utilize the same variables, as well as clear but brief documentation on how to use the new UI kit in consistent ways to allow easy broad tweaks in the future.
I implemented a standard for UI documentation that gave specific Angular components, element hierarchy, and CSS classes to greatly increase the efficiency of development from design and documentation.
I am currently research and testing, in collaboration with the VP: Engineering & IT how to create a pipeline utilizing emerging technologies to allow Figma's Code Connect and AI MCP to connect with the AI in VS Code to allow developers to "read" the Figma file and utilize our coded components to recreate the layout automatically with human oversight and correction to further decrease the development time.