Strategies & Methodologies

UX Strategy

A career focus, I love defining and driving UX strategy across a variety of product verticals in different tech industries. It goes far beyond the software. It’s considering the end-to-end customer journey, the internal users, and all of the touch points along the way, ultimately leading to how the customer feels about the product.

Design Org Strategy

Growing and defining UX organizations has been an exciting career challenge. Embedded, centralized, or hybrid? How does UX represent at the leadership level? What role do we hire next to scale strategically? It’s a dynamic, compelling puzzle.

Content Strategy

As a rabid word-nerd, content strategy is close to my heart: translating dev-speak to helpful messaging, creating strategies for large scale help content, and testing which button text converts best. And in-context micro-content? Pinch me.

Workshop Facilitation

One of my favorite professional tasks is workshop and meeting facilitation. I’m a quiet human by nature so I prefer to get the room talking, and guide folks to collaborate, discuss, argue, and emerge with actions that they’re excited about. They’re engaged and leave with ownership and buy-in. Yay.

The Agile Mindset

Having an Agile mindset goes beyond guiding development teams to full maturity and working with them to achieve a product vision. It’s integrating design into the I also use Agile methods for meeting facilitation, influencing cross-functional groups, and providing structure in chaos. It can apply to anything —even party planning— with stickies, of course. Lots and lots of stickies.

User Research

My favorite research methodology? Contextual inquiry. My most interesting observational research has been riding with paramedics at different EMS agencies across the country. Wow. Having access to this kind of qualitative data, paired with varying sources of quantitative data, paints a complete picture of user needs and helps ensure we’re solving real problems.

User Testing

How else can we know we’re building the right thing? Throughout the product lifecycle, I’ve dabbled in click tests, preference tests, in-depth moderated tests, and lots of guerrilla testing. Data! I’m especially intrigued watching users wend their way through a new feature during a moderated test. Fascinating intel.

Usability

User control, flexibility and consistency, and minimalist design are only a few of the usability principles used to create better experiences. I like heuristic evaluations as a low-cost analysis tool. It helps to communicate and highlight usability gaps, with the backing of best practices and universal guidelines.

Inclusive Design

Inclusive design is part of creating holistic experience for any user. Beyond color simulators and screen readers, accessibility makes the web available to everyone. I’ve completed extensive accessibility training and believe accessibility to be an essential best practice in designing experiences.

UI Design

Excellent UI is made up of well-known patterns, contextual considerations, and minimalist display. I’ve seen how poor UI can quickly erode a product’s market share and the user’s trust. Similarly, I’ve seen good UI sell products. UX is not UI, but UI is a critical component of UX.

Visual Design

When I’m teaching people about UX, I describe it as a lasagna, comprised of many complex and integral layers. Visual design provides that top presentation layer— the thing you see when the lasagna comes out of the oven that makes you say, “Oh, that’s going to be good.”