My UX Design Principles

  • I’m obsessed with the user and focus my research and design on better, simpler, easier, faster and more intuitive user experiences for customers.
  • I take ownership of all my projects and work to create an innovative environment where I can look for new, interesting ideas from everywhere.
  • I challenge the status quo and work hard to disconfirm common beliefs about how things should be done. My instincts are guided by research and are often right.
  • I have the skills and a passion for finding simple solutions to complexity and big data problems.
  • I am a curious lifelong learner, adaptable, a diligent data analyst, a self starter, team and relationship builder and excellent communicator.
  • I have a bias for action, calculated risk taking and deliver results in a timely fashion and despite obstacles and setbacks, never settle.
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My UX design process involves intensive customer research, user personas, user maps and flows, concept sketches and rapid ideation of wireframes and mockups.
Case Study

Data
Analytics
Case Study

Legacy ERP
Applications

Case Study

Talent
Network
Case Study

Big Data
Application

Case Study

Game-Based
Training

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Timecard
Dashboard

Case Study

Community College Data Analytics

The Intellecta application is designed to deliver actionable analytics to 116
public community colleges in California for phase one and 825 additional public
community colleges in the U.S., with potential revenue of $2.3M in it’s first year.

Problem

Modernize a legacy data analytics application for Community Colleges that was developed on the Microsoft Power BI platform. The application goal is to license to 941 public U.S. community colleges.

My Role

I focused my design thinking on how this data could be designed in a new technology platform. I deconstructed the Power BI legacy application into all the various user functions. I developed personas of application users, sketched new user flows and worked with a team UX designer for data visualizations and interaction design.

Solution

The Intallecta analytics application gives an overview of college and student activity and trends and allows users to drill down into specific data and edge cases, including student demographics and student course engagement. The data is packaged into a powerful interactive analytics visualization suite with clear user interactions that keep the user experience simple and easy to use.
Case Study

Advantage Solutions ERP Applications

Modernize five legacy applications for a $4B revenue client that extends to 60
retail teams, 390,000 retail stores, 3,500 clients and millions of products.

Problem

Modernize five legacy retail applications with a new data-driven design strategy. I focused on optimizing the legacy logistics tools, researched how current work is assigned to the retail store reps (manage retail store visit), redesigned old planning tools, added new data analytics visualizations and a customer administration portal.

My Role

User research sessions with product managers and client to understand business requirements, identify users (personas) and sketch out the core user flows. I worked daily with staff UX designers to iterate and improve the mockups.

My Process

The redesign for ASM involved a significant amount of user research, partnering with the product management team to break down the core functionally of a wide variety of ASM legacy applications. I gathered ASM materials for contextual studies, researched ASM work personas for application users that include TAM (Technical Account Manager), DRO (Director of Retail Operations), ROM (Regional Operations Manager), RS (Retail Supervisor) and RSM (Retail Store Rep – mobile user).
All key navigation interactions are on the top level of the application, so they can be used at anytime, without disrupting the context and flow of what the user is doing.
Having multiple application users (personas), 60 retail teams, 390,000 retail stores, 3,500 clients and millions of products adds application complexity.
Each Retail Supervisor (RS persona) is on a client retail team and manages the logistics for at least 3 regional areas with approximately 600 retail stores.
Each Retail Supervisor (RS persona) manages complex team schedules and rep store calls within a regional area. There is a high turnover rate of store reps.
Store Rep (RSM persona) manages regional stores and executes retailer product distribution and promotion strategies with the Insight Mobile application

Solution

The new modernized data-driven application platform services more than 40 countries and 3,500 clients. It optimizing logistics, workload planning, client promotions and manages retail store visits. The application allows retailers to identify, capture and execute their retail strategies.
Case Study

Talent Network Application

This application delivers actionable analytics to over 4,500 Talent Network and
Career Sites for customers ranging in size from small to multi-national corporations.

Problem

Without clear and simple data analytics, it was hard to see candidate re-engagement in a company’s Talent Network. Recruiters are often sitting on an overwhelming amount of data and can’t effectively use it to drive better decisions.

My Role

I worked with product and sales managers to understand how users could make better decisions from in-depth data analysis. I developed personas based on this research, sketched out the core user flows and produced high-fidelity mockups.

Solution

The Talent Network Analytics application gives a full overview of all account activity with a clear funnel view of the Career site's engagement. The data is packaged into a powerful interactive visualization suite that allows users to drill down into specific data and edge cases, including job locations, traffic sources, mobile devices and how many emails were delivered.
CareerBuilder launched an initiative to build mobile-first, optimized Career Sites for their enterprise customers like Hilton and realized they needed an analytics application to understand candidate behavior and the power of their Talent Network's automated re-engagement engine.

Easy To Use

I work hard to ideate and simplify the application navigation, site interactions and the user flows. In this application, all key user navigation and data filtering, menu interactions are on the top navigation level of the application, so they can be used at anytime, without disrupting the natural context and flow of what the user is doing. On average, when Talent Network acts as a client’s career site, clients see 23% more applicants than through sites hosted by an ATS or agency.
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Intuitive User Actions

Inside the application, users can drill down into the data with menu and selection interactions, all to support insights into the data, conversations about the candidates and information discovery. Mobile-first data analytics are available in over 32 languages worldwide.
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Case Study

Big Data Application Suite (BDAS)

BDAS is the most compressive data analytics application in the HR industry, PepsiCo was the launch partner. The application provides an end-to-end solution for the entire recruitment chain. The application grew to 20 high profile clients in the first year, generating over $2M in revenue.

Problem

Half of hiring managers never use big data to devise recruitment strategies, and more than half of HR managers (56 percent) rate their proficiency in workforce analytics as fair or poor. The sheer volume and complexity of the data can cause recruiters and talent acquisition leaders to struggle to discover insights and tell the story in the data.

My Role

I worked with the HR executives of PepsiCo and other stakeholders to research how users could make better decisions from in-depth data analysis of HR hire, source and job performance data.
PepsiCo executives went on a two-day retreat to define the data requirements – resulting in a complicated set of KPI spreadsheets.

Whiteboarding

To reduce complicated data into simple visualizations, I create ideation design sessions where designers feel comfortable to collaborate, draw and write on whiteboards. My research process involves intensive user research to rank, highlight, prioritize and visualize the data it in a way that’s easy for users to understand.
I collaborate with my team – sketching whiteboard wireframes and diagrams to define the application content and user flow scenarios.

My Process

I have hands-on experience managing all design aspects of a UX project from start to finish. I research and analyze the requirements, plan user flows and map out the visual and interaction design of key application screens. Using pre-set rules based on technical requirements, the BDAS application audits data in advance, exposing inaccuracies to ensure consistency and reliability of data.
Application screens are researched and rapidly sketched into wireframe mockups. This summary concept sketch shows the most important data and allows the user to drill down into the information.

Solution

The Big Data Analytics Suite creates a report (in seconds) that combines data from a wide range of sources, including career sites, multi-posting systems, applicant tracking systems, human resource information systems and third-party market data – resulting in an accurate, detailed picture of the whole recruitment operation. This allows users to make better decisions, discover insights and tell the story in the data.
This dashboard tells the story about what’s happening in the recruitment process and job activity in a three-month period with simple drill-down data analytics

Interactive Analytics:

The application is designed for conversational analytics, to drill down into the data and make the big issues and complex data surrounding talent acquisition easy to discuss with company leaders, recruiters and hiring managers. The key interactive components of the data help tell the story about what’s happening in the recruitment process - these meaningful insights are designed to make better decisions and change user behaviors.

Data Rich Information Drives The Design Process

With data-driven historical insights, and easy to comprehend reports, recruiters can more easily set expectations for hiring managers, make the case for alternative recruitment tactics, and budget appropriately. User research – getting inside the user’s thought process allows me to better understand how information helps users make better decisions from in-depth data analysis.

Improved User Insights

The BDAS application can analyze precise performance and ROI results of each advertising source based on numerous factors, including job location, job title, time-to-hire and cost per hire. The dashboard is crafted to relay complicated data and information in a simple and self-explanatory design.

Evaluate Performance

This dashboard is a snapshot of individual recruiter activity and performance – the BDAS application measures individual recruiter performance with at-a-glance visuals and gives HR managers the ability to rate their team members from high to low performance based on common metrics, giving managers the insights needed to coach a full team
Case Study

USAF Game-Based Training Application

This effort will extend the capabilities used by the gaming industry to provide a shared
operational environment for a rapid, distributed, information and training network. This
product will leverage the strategies employed in online video games to produce a social
and cooperative learning experience to support USAF training materials.

Problem

USAF training materials come from diverse resources and data sources, Every Airman learns skills with different resources and sometimes with inconsistent data. Too much of an Airman’s time is spent on gathering information for learning activities, instead of building skills quickly within a social network.

My Role

I researched content specific user roles and personas, sketched out the core user flows and produced the high-fidelity mockups.
The Air Force is not alone in facing the challenges and opportunities of the contemporary context. The Department of Defense must be prepared to deal with technological, operational, and tactical surprise, which requires changes to the way we train and educate our forces.

Gamified Design

Much of an Airman’s down-time time is spent playing video games, socializing and developing deep game-based skills. Why not use this classic approach to distributed learning and mobile game-based content to achieve a common goal and optimize learning objectives in a gamified system that most USAF Airman are already familiar with.

Solution

This effort was developed as part of a USAF innovation research grant to investigate game-based methodologies and capabilities leveraged by game developers in order to stimulate a new type of agile learning. I designed a competitive level-based social learning environment for gamers that allowed for strategic-level interaction between players.
Case Study

Timecard Verification Dashboard

In each of Raytheon’s strategic business areas, it employed senior security
investigators to manually examine, analyze and verify employee timecard records.
By automatically verifying timecard hours in this AI-based analytics application,
the defense company saves over $4M per year in wages for security officers.

Problem

If an employee is suspected of cheating on their timecard while working on a government contract, it would put Raytheon at risk with the DOD. The effort for the internal security officers to manually analyze, report and verify employee work hours from timecard data, IOT systems and sensor data was tedious and expensive.

My Role

I met with the top Security Director at Raytheon in El Segundo to research the application requirements. I designed the new dashboard and produced the mockups.

Solution

My goal was to design a data-driven dashboard that could automatically analyze, verify and report employee work hours from timecard data, sensor data and IOT systems data without the need for any manual labor. Now, by automatically verifying timecard hours in an analytics dashboard, the company saves millions of dollars per year on security wages.

Visual Design

My early career experience as a visual journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle and my ability to research has added a dimension to my work in UX design. I have the skills and a passion for simplifying complex information. I am a curious lifelong learner, adaptable, a diligent data analyst, a self-starter and excellent communicator. I have researched, designed and Illustrated the Visual designs (right)
Click on image (above) for High-resolution visual design portfolio samples.Information Design Projects for San Francisco Chronicle, Exploratourim Science, Mueseum, Raytheon, Xerox Labs.