Projects
Information architecture revamp
Strategic problem - As a company has more product offerings, it’s unclear where to position new products on the navigation and on the website.
Research methodology
Card sort - create mental models of how website visitors group and perceive the new small business product offerings in relation to the core small business financial products. I.e., figure out what visitors are mostly looking for on the website.
NAV tree testing A - establish a quantitative baseline of easy it is to find information based on the present website navigation
NAV tree testing B - test performance of navigation information architecture concepts that were created based on the card sort research findings.
NAV design concept testing - unmoderated user testing array of new navigation designs and content with the winning information architecture concepts
Design concept testing - in-depth interviews about enhanced desktop and mobile navigation experience
NAV tree testing C - capture whether new information architecture concepts result in an improved ability for users to find information
Live A/B test on production
Impact - A navigation that better maps to user mental models.
Capturing Free Trial customer needs
Strategic problem - The retention rate of new small businesses that sign up for accounting software as a “Try it free” customer is lower than those who decide to “Buy now.”
Research methodology
Analytics analysis - define and validate the retention numbers between “Try it free” versus “Buy now” customers.
In-depth interviews - capture the mindset of small business segments that
“Try it now” and subscribe
“Try it now” and cancel
“Buy now”
Survey - carried over findings and surveyed the three customer segments from the in-depth interviews.
Impact - Leadership buy-in to test a unique product experience for “Try it now” customers since they are starting their experience with a different mindset.
Simply Stakeholders UI audit
Tactical goal - Quickly revamping product usability.
Research methodology
Heuristic evaluation - Section by section UI audit of the product
Concept testing - Unmoderated user testing of lo-fi designs to capture user perception
Usability testing - Unmoderated user testing of hi-fi design to frictions in task completion
Prioritization roadmap - going task-by-task in Asana with the front-end team to articulate the user tradeoff versus engineering effort for each change
Impact - A more consistent experience for the user. From the initial UI audit to the first rollout of production changes in 8 weeks.
Expanding online design thinking courses
As in-person gatherings have been limited due to COVID-19, our team has pivoted a legacy Stanford course into an online experience. For 3-months in 2020, I was tasked with finding new audiences that would most benefit from the novel online format.
Interviewing CEOs, user researchers, data scientists, and product managers, I first captured how design thinking has impacted their workflow. Then, I turned these findings into technical blogs and web updates, which could be shared with new audiences, and proposed marketing strategies organization directors. As a result, our team was able to attract new participants to maintain enthusiastic levels of enrollment for online design thinking offerings.
Bringing military mapping Software to commercial industries
This 5-month project expanded military 3D mapping technology to new international commercial clients. I was responsible for identifying the unique mapping needs of business customers.
I worked closely with the product team to turn usability research, function and task studies, and customer interviews into technical blogs, news articles, and on-boarding documentation. Also, the research guided engineering about future product capabilities. This work resulted in 2 standard deviation higher number of website visitors and time-on-website compared to before launching blogs, articles, and documentation.
Capturing risk software impacts on emergency management workflows
I led a 6-month partnership with an emergency management software company that wanted improved user experience knowledge. My task was to research the impact new technologies have on workflows and decision making.
I interviewed emergency management departments, police departments, and FEMA and turned the findings into qualitative and mathematical decision models. Then, working closely alongside the product team, we translated the user research findings into business insights. Also, I presented at company all-hands to convey the impacts of their systems.
Deploying Social media analytics software for search and rescue
Several teams at the US Coast Guard found value in using social media analytics software as part of the search and rescue workflow. I was tasked with identifying current onboarding pinch points and launching the software to more Coast Guard teams ahead of the 2017 Hurricane season.
I created a persona and journey map of the prototypical user based on my interviews and field studies, then conveyed the user experience back to the 5 person engineering team. The findings improved onboarding processes and features, resulting in deploying the software to Coast Guard units along the East Coast over two months. After the success of this initial deployment, our team received several million in funding from DHS to support further development.
Improving emergency management Dashboards
Over 6-months, I partnered with a software company to capture how new display dashboards were being used by the community. My goal was to provide business insights to improve the design of future displays.
I regularly interviewed an array of emergency managers and community leaders, and turned the findings into novel research methods based on situation awareness and social networks to measure the software impacts. The initial business insights led to the support of a 3-years of research funding from the government of Queensland Australia to scale the work across the entire state.
Quantifying the value of small airports
US taxpayers pay over $300M annually to subsidize air transportation to small communities, but the community benefit was unclear. My goal was to measure the value of airports in small communities and propose a more efficient funding structure.
I first led field studies to select remote communities and then launched national surveys to sample transportation needs. These qualitative findings guided the creation of a decision optimization model based on transportation and economic data, which resulted in a proposed savings of $2.5M for the FAA while serving 47k more passengers. The project's success resulted in the Japanese, Australian, and Chinese government financial support to bring these research methods abroad.
Human-in-the-loop pilot Testing for Situation Awareness
For this 3-month project, I developed new test procedures to measure situation awareness. I created test scenarios in a flight simulator, recruited pilot participants, collected performance data, and analyzed their performance. As a result, we published new theories of how to better map situation awareness to performance.