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Currently, I work at Everfi as a Mid-Level Product Designer. Over my career, I have had the amazing opportunity to work with companies big and small. That experience has shaped me into the designer I am today.

Throughout the course of my career I have become passionate about crafting experiences that help solve really challenging problems within our world such as, healthcare, education or climate change; or helps humanity explore the bounds of reality.

When I'm not designing, you can catch me enjoying time with family and friends, watching an interesting show or anime, or indulging in my numerous hobbies or projects I never seem to have the time to complete 🤣.

Design System

Role
Design System Designer
Timeline
1 year
Overview

Offerpad was a new real estate tech company, that lacked consistency and efficiency among our design language. While at Offerpad I was tasked with leading the development of our design system to help improve on those inefficiencies.

Problem

Offerpad was spending too much time and effort reinventing the wheel from a design and engineering perspective. Their also was an inconsistent design language amongst all products.

Solution

I collaborated with engineering to create a shared design language amongst our products and speed up dev time for our products.

How we did it

Collaboration: I established a close working relationship with engineering to in order to identify key components and patterns that create the most challenges and take up unnecessary time. We met frequently to ensure the quality of the components as well as to discuss any challenges they were facing.

Create a process: I worked with engineering to create a system that made it easier to communicate where in the process we were when creating new components. This process streamlined things and held us accountable.

Build as we go: As the only designer building out our design system, I didn't really have much time to spend hours of time building out a comprehensive system. Many times I had to build as we went and refinement came as we worked with the same components in numerous places.

Takeaways
  1. Design Systems have dedicated teams for a reason. After building a design system, it was clear why there are teams dedicated solely to this design discipline. Although possible to build a design system with a limited team, it is extremely difficult when there is not dedicated time allocated to accomplishing it.
  2. Start with the most impactful. Most people believe that the first place to start with a design system is the button. But that's an easy way to fall on your face. Had a started with a more complex and complicated component, I could have saved my team more time. Building out a button takes considerably less time than a key component that has much deeper nuances.
  3. Collaboration is key. Building a design goes beyond just design. There are multiple important parties to building an successful design system but you partnership with your team and engineering is crucial. Understanding what your team needs from a design aspect and what will make engineering job easier as well is how you create a system that doesn't go to the design graveyard.

Offer Letter

Role
UI Designer
UX Researcher
Timeline
2 Months
Problem

Offer Letter was experiencing a significant drop-off after users got past the second page of their offer. This drop off affected the number of official offers Offerpad could send so that they could more effectively convert on leads.

Solution

After a lengthy process we decided on a design that consolidated the once 6 page design, down to 1. The final solution, gave users the ability to view all the important information needed to make an informed decision, make selections that are needed for Offerpad to send an official offer, and confirm their choices to have Offerpad send an agreement.

How we did it

Data Analysis: The UX designer and I worked together to identify patterns or reasons for the substantial drop-off using FullStory.

Framing the hypothesis: Now informed by data, we hypothesized that a shorter form with all of the information presented at the start would increase conversion rate and trust with the user.

Designing a new UI: While designing the new flow and UI we had key areas we wanted to focus on.

  1. Being able to create a shorter more concise form that gave more information about how the offer was determined.
  2. Offering price transparency, because based off of certain selections within the offer, it could affect the price.
  3. Offering more transparent information about the price and how it is made, to create trust among users.

User Research: After the completion of the new design we ran a usability comparison test that focused on time to completion, ease of navigation, and ability to understand. The results were as follows:

  1. When asked about ease of use the 8/10 user gave the new design a 5 compared to 5/10 users giving the old design a 5.
  2. The new offer took 101 secs to complete compared to 179 secs for the old offer.
  3. 8/10 users preferred the new offer letter design to the old one.
Takeaways
  1. Quantitative and Qualitative research go hand in hand. Often times we get consumed with what and not the how and why. Because we spent time identifying the what, how, and why. We had a better understanding of the goal we were trying to solve.
  2. Constraints can make a big impact. The first iteration of the new design actually included a sentiment analysis. However, due to technical constraints it was left out for the time being. Luckily the feature did not affect the entire flow but had it been a bigger part of the big picture it could have caused a lot of headache.

Improving Research Practices

Role
UX Designer
UX Researcher
Timeline
Ongoing
Overview

Everfi is a large for-good company that values the practice of design and research. While at Everfi I have worked to advocate and implement more impactful research practices.

Problem

Although Everfi has a very comprehensive research practice baked into their product development process. I discovered that Everfi may not be getting the most impact or meaningful results out of their user test. Some of the problems that needed to be addressed were:

  1. A majority of users on our course side are students we need parental consent in order to conduct test. This frequently created issues where parents stepped in for students to complete the test, which in turn resulted in inconsistent testing results.
  2. Testing is a baked in process within the Everfi product development cycle. This practice, while not inherently bad, typically prompts us to usability test without having a real goal in mind. This takes time away from more meaningful testing.
Solution

The solutions to the problems we faced were as follows:

  1. A team member and I worked to reframe the testing directions. This iteration explicitly asks parents to take a step back and allow their children to be in the driver seat. This change was a success and allowed us to generate more accurate results and gauge if students actually understood the information.

  2. Work with Key Stakeholders to uncover the root reason for testing. This allows us to really understand what we are testing for and what success looks like. This also pushes us out of the need to test every little interaction and/or established pattern, and push for more meaningful testing that really drives results.

Approach

Identifying pain points: While each problem is faced with its own challenges, it all begins with identifying the pain points that are impeding the team from being as efficient and impactful as possible.

Stakeholder Buy-in: After identifying the problem, I brought the information to my my VP of Design. I made a case for why these changes were important, and how improving these areas could make a positive impact within our team.

Taking action: Since I had the buy-in of senior stakeholders, it made it much easier to take action and implement solutions I believed would help the team. This also prompted the VP of Design to set aside time for us as a design team to surface other issues we may have been having, and propose solutions

Measure Results: While on this journey to improve research practices I have noticed that there has been an increase in the accuracy of results produced as well as a new found resurgence of design taking more ownership over the research process.

Takeaways
  1. Buy in is just as important as identifying the problem: As designers we are trained in identifying problems but often times we forget that identifying the problem is the first step. If you can't get the support of others, the change you are trying to drive can often times fall on deaf ears. So, selling and hypothesizing why a change could be impactful is crucial.