The first big task I took on at Adobe was to redesign the Adobe Genesis UI for the 3.0 release. For many years the UI had stayed pretty much the same, and served a basic function: choose a third-party vendor and launch a wizard to integrate the data between the vendor and SiteCatalyst. However, once this integration was set up users of the Digital Marketing Suite didn't know where to find the data, what to do with it, and how to check that their integration was working properly. We decided to reposition Genesis as a data destination for all third-party data instead of just an administrative tool. To do this required substantial UI and systems design, as well as cross-team collaboration.

The timeframe for design was squeezed into just a few weeks, with no opportunity to talk directly with users since they largely didn't exist for what were were trying to accomplish. However, I was able to do some self-ethnography with the existing tool, read blog posts written by people like our target persona, and interview consultants inside Adobe who helped customers set up integrations. This helped me to identify what were the most important elements to build and communicate it to the product team. This included making the data findable within the suite, making the inner workings of the integration transparent, and improving the customer support options available to the user.

The nature of working on this type of product is that there are a lot of internal stakeholders that need to be accounted for. To make the most of this situation I worked to quickly create sketches and a clickable prototype that I used with all the various stakeholders. This helped to not only weed out unspoken concerns, but also to bridge communication gaps about what Genesis was supposed to represent to our users and to the company. This was especially important because many of the key enhancements required that the marketing, consulting, client care, engineering, product, and user experience teams all contribute something to make the release a success.

During my three-month internship as an Interaction Design intern at Disney Animation Studios, I was part of team of designers and engineers tasked with implementing an internal content-sharing/management system. My role was to research how engineers and animators at Disney Animation share, find, and navigate the overwhelming amount of disparate internal information sources, and provide design solutions to improve the process.

RESEARCH PHASE

I began by interviewing several engineers and animators to understand how they find and distribute content. I followed this with contextual inquiry to understand how they actually use the tools available to them, and where the hurdles were for employees to find the information they needed to get their work done. One of the key insights I found was that there was a misconception that documentation for animation tools didn't get created. The actual situation was that were so many sharing tools in use that nobody knew which one to use.

I created a collection of personas based on my research, with three main roles becoming the focus of the design work: Engineers, Technical Directors, and Animators. The engineers and technical directors were not motivated to consistently create documentation for the software because it took too long and they believed nobody read it or improved upon it. The animators were not motivated to seek out the information because the search tools were not reliable and thus they believed the documentation didn't exist.

DESIGN

Due to the complexities of a primarily social problem space, there was no silver-bullet technological solution. We decided to approach the problem on three fronts:

1: Consolidate docs to a common "product page" location in the IT intranet, and provide a consistent but flexible process for creating and linking to documentation through the common location.

2: Create a Landing Page for the intranet that supports the most common use cases for the personas.

3: Address issues with the search app across the entire company intranet, since it is the first thing all employees use to navigate to information.

To do this I made paper prototypes to get feedback from users to ensure the product pages fit their needs. I did this not just for usability's sake, but also because I knew that for this new tool to have a chance at widespread adoption, the creation of it would need to be inclusive and transparent.

I built sample product pages within the SBS system and redesigned the Landing Page based on the primary use case: Animators looking for technical contact info or documentation, and the secondary use case: Developers editing documentation. Unfortunately the issues with the search app on the company intranet were too large in scope for me to tackle during my internship. However, with the product pages and Landing Page implemented in the SBS system I was able to piece together a live demo of the streamlined workflows - showing users how easy it could be once the search app was redesigned. This work was demoed during the 2010 summer intern showcase, as well as to the entire Disney Animation Software Engineering Team.

This was a year-long capstone project for my MS degree in Human Computer Interaction/Design. The goal of this design was to provide World of Warcraft players with meaningful representations of their time investment in the game world. The process started with user research, as well as literature and exemplar reviews to obtain insights and design inspiration.

During the concept generation phase, I kept coming back to a major insight from my user research: players often use screenshots to preserve virtual world memories, much the same as a photograph. Also, many of the player-created artifacts that make up the community external to the game world begin with a screenshot. However, the current services that offer photo sharing, hosting, and searching are not ideal for virtual world screenshots. This is mainly because they treat them as photographs, and don't take advantage of the unique properties of screenshots and the metadata they provide.

After several rounds of prototyping and user testing, I ended with a clickable prototype for a conceptual service I call WoW Capture, an online environment where players can upload, view, and share screenshots taken in the virtual world. Screenshots are auto-tagged with metadata from the game, which provides players with new ways to explore the game world, reflect on their experiences, create new ones, and share them with others. For further details you can watch the video of my capstone presentation (25 minutes).