Hands-on product design director. Building and leading teams that create cutting-edge digital and physical products
Introduction
The products surrounding us - from thermostats to office software - get in the way of our goals more often than helping achieve them. User Experience is about improving the lives of everyone who feels that they spend more time fighting with their products rather than doing what those products were supposed to enable them to do.
(2000 - 2024)
Background
Designing and building custom systems for finance, retail, healthcare, biopharma, education - they all provide unique perspectives. and demonstrate that that ideas from one domain can cross-pollinate into others creating unexpected and meaningful experiences.
By combining finance and education, we can open opportunities to students who would otherwise have been left behind. By combining patient analytics with AI and call center models, we can literally save lives.
Now, the focus of user experience is to evolve the vision, the products, the process, evangelize the value, and lead the teams to make those experiences and outcomes a reality.
Examples
A small sample of what hands-on leadership has accomplished
Account Reconciliation
Redesign - responsive Web - Card-based design - informed by research - simplified navigation
Original - Windows-only - developer driven - information overload - complex navigation
OneStream’s core value proposition is consolidating financial and human capital information from multiple sources into one data model for accounting, analysis, planning, and forecasting. This is something that currently takes entire departments to achieve with a large margin of error.
Account reconciliation is a critical component of OneStream’s platform, allowing for efficient financial close and budgeting, enabling what OneStream refers to as “exponential value” - taking away the burden of wrangling multiple contradictory sets of information so the business can focus on its goals.
The original product was developer-driven and very complex to use - involving hundreds of hours of training for even the most basic of tasks.
A focus on research, usability, design, and development had three primary goals:
Target the end user experience toward real-world needs and journeys
Remove unnecessary complexity to make the product infinitely more adoptable without over-simplifying its abilities - much of this using predictive machine learning and generative AI.
Translate the product from its legacy Windows thick client to a responsive product usable on multiple platforms from browser to mobile.
This effort encompassed the entire product, but Account Reconciliations was a central first step toward creating a research, design, agile development, and testing process, as well as a robust design system to be used internally and by third-party partners developing solutions inside the OneStream ecosystem.
OneStream Software
Patient Care Management
Physician native mobile patient record for use during patient visits and record review
Patient Web and native health management and televisit platform
Real-time patient health statistic monitoring and alerting
Connected in-home devices for chronic condition management - including home delivery and self-setup - and the team and facilities that made it possible.
Chronic condition management includes everything from diabetes to post-operative care. It requires a three-party system with two primary goals:
Monitoring and maintaining the patient’s health
Preventing acute episodes that require hospitalization
Alere ACS created an innovative ecosystem to achieve positive patient outcomes. The UX team conducted the research and created the vision that turned it into a reality.
Through on-site collaboration with care management staff, physicians, specialists, and patients, a multi-disciplinary team was organized to design and deliver digital and physical products as well as an entire patient journey from diagnosis and treatment through ongoing condition management.
In partnership with development, management, UX, and our customers, care management call centers were enabled to proactively monitor patients’ health. In-home devices (even to the point of condition-specific package design and instruction) were designed, created, and delivered. Tele-visitation, alerts to care providers, specialists, physicians, and patients were all part of the care journey.
The ecosystem was first adopted by the UK National Health Service, and later acquired by United Healthcare for $600 million to form the basis of a new approach to healthcare and health insurance.
This later became pivotal during the Covid pandemic, allowing immuno-compromised, high-risk patients to be monitored remotely without the need to expose themselves to the dangers of a medical office or hospital environment.
Alere Accountable Care Solutions
Human Capital Management
Tablet-optimized responsive Web application. Targeted to the hiring manager user community, recasting and integrating with existing back-end functionality through secure APIs
Behind-the-scenes: Configurable forms ranging from application, evaluation, selection, and on-boarding.
Human Capital Management involves
finding the right people
compensating them competitively based on role, geography, and retention goals
Evolving and promoting employees based on performance and business needs
Kenexa has a robust high-volume recruiting solution used by its customers to collect and sort through thousands of applicants. In conducting focus groups with those customers, research discovered that the handoff between those hiring centers and the individual hiring managers was difficult because the managers were expected to use the same complex platform with little or no training. The platform was designed for a different user community, and while it worked well for those users, it simply didn’t “think” like a manager.
Through a series of design thinking workshops and constant customer input, RapidHire was created. Utilizing the back-end of the existing platform, RapidHire presents the output of the high-volume screening process to hiring managers in an easy-to-use manner. While it was developed as a responsive Web application, the focus was on tablet delivery, because research discovered that our customers wanted their managers on-the-floor and not in a back office.
The front end was designed to be expanded beyond hiring and into performance reviews, bonuses, promotions, and opening new positions, creating an end-to-end talent management solution for hiring managers.
Kenexa’s talent management suite was acquired by IBM for $1.3 billion to form the basis of IBM’s “Smarter Workforce” effort.
Kenexa (an IBM company)
Personalized Retail
Personalized, location-aware mobile application with offers targeted to increase retailer revenue and shopper value
Targeted offers from retailers and manufacturers delivered based on machine learning of shoppers’ segmentation and shopping history.
Birdzi’s intelligent white-labeled solution allows regional retailers to compete with larger entities like WalMart and Costco by giving their customers access to personalized offers inside a mobile shopping application.
Offers are provided by manufacturers and the retailer, and a three-part escalating revenue stream is created:
Offer viewed
Offer activated
Offer redeemed
The retailer and manufacturer can analyze shopper activity to segment customers, evaluate shopping patterns, and determine the right offers for locations and customers.
Paired with beacons and location-aware features, the platform can also be used beyond a single retailer - as in the case of the Hometown concept.
UX drove research and conceptual design for the next generation of the product and oversaw its development on-site in the both the US and India, as well as its deployment to the effect of:
A 17% increase in average basket size from $44.02 in 2022 to $51.50 per shopper.
A $388.96 rise in annual spending per shopper based on one visit per week.
A 16% increase in percentage of sales from loyalty members.
A 10% increase in the number of categories shopped, indicating heightened engagement across more areas of the store.
The solution was highlighted as a “Game Changer” by Store Brands and recognized by New Jersey’s leading business journal - NJBIZ - for excellence in technology and leadership.
Birdzi, Inc.