In November 2017, I was brought onto the Aequilibrium team as a UX/UI Designer to design software solutions for our North American client base. During my tenure, I have been elevated to UX/UI Project Lead followed by Product Design Project Lead, spearheaded the development of our UX framework, worked on pitch teams that secured millions of dollars of revenue and won two major UX awards. Most important of all, I've learned how to support those around me to grow and flourish and to intentionally create happier more effective teams. While working within the constraints of NDA, the below case study is designed to showcase my UX process using sample artifacts with anonymized data. Some of the clients I've worked with as available on our website are below.
Discover
The problem space.
My role at Aequilibrium is to be the point person on every project, accountable to clients, leadership, and the UX delivery team. I'll be on-boarded at inception to help facilitate discovery sessions, foster client relationships, unearth 'real' problems, set metrics for success, and develop a roll-out strategy for delivery. During my tenure, I've been actively engaged in client sessions that have directly contributed to the signing of new clients, building sales pipelines, and the growth of revenue for the company.
Client Discoveries | Persona Modelling | Journey Mapping
Research & insight.
A solid research piece lays the foundation for an informed product strategy. As well as conducting audits, concept testing, and research, our team will utilize tools like Lighthouse, Google Analytics, and Adobe Analytics to get the data that unearths insights. I spearheaded the initiative for our team to get coaching in data analysis to improve our data-driven decisions. This undoubtedly helped us create more informed product strategies and set more targeted metrics for success.
Research Reports | Analytics Reports | UX Audits | User Testing
Define
Interpret & analyze.
To prepare for a build I’ll work with the business development team to analyze the project requirements which will inform our stories and epics. From here, our team will audit and redesign complex task flows and the information architecture (IA) map will take form. For a recent banking project dealing with a website migration to a new platform, I developed a system that managed the migration of content for hundreds of pages, that was directly linked to the structure of IA map. This has since been adopted as a service offering for the company.
User Stories | Information Architecture | Task Flows
Ideate
Concepting.
Our team will use storyboarding and conceptual designs to help pitch our ideas internally or to a client. Storyboarding how the solution will work in the real world helps to better understand how it'll help users. Storyboarding the NFC tap-to-tag functionality helped me to map touchpoints and explore the physical to digital possibilities for the Sneaker Con app across the event space.
Storyboarding | Conceptual Designs
Prototyping & testing.
Our team will build prototypes and we'll recruit users to test, iterate, test, and iterate until we’re ready to move forward with a solution. I’ve led our team in conducting usability studies, and we’ve had fun along the way destroying assumptions and gaining insights that lead to big pivots. For our Sneaker Con iOS app, we recruited a group of sneakerheads in New York to usability test throughout the project which ensured the app was completely tailored to this niche market.
The below are slides are taken from a regular Power Hour I give to UX students at BrainStation on ‘Prototyping and User Testing’.
Wireframing | Rapid Prototyping | Design Sprints | Usability Testing
Implement
High-fidelity design.
When it comes to visual design our team is very focused on producing high-quality products that look spacious and clean. My below designs were live for 'Aeqbanking' website in 2019 - one of our now retired divisional brands. For our design system, we used type hierarchy and rich in-house imagery to create impact and rhythm. I'm passionate about delivering exceptional products that look and feel beautiful, their beauty is often in their simplicity.
Product Design | Interaction Design | Brand Design | UI Style Guides
Interaction design.
We further bring our products to life with elegant interactions using the best tool for the job. I've crafted simple 1-hour interactions in Principle and InVision Studio for our company website. The Aequilibrium website About Us page is a good example of this. When tasked with running a usability study on an internal Team Portal POC, our team created a fully-functional web portal in Webflow. The fully interactive prototype helped gain rich user insights during the usability study.
Delivering.
Managing the delivery of projects is my specialty, with 9-years of experience in product management and business, and 2-years as a project lead at a digital agency. I'm adept at managing the complexity of all the moving parts and keeping the players and processes aligned on achieving the vision. This comes from my instinctive ability to zoom out in order to understand and articulate vision and strategy, and then zoom in and see how each pixel, person, and moment will come together to achieve that vision.
Project Lead | Project Management
Evaluate
Reflect and analyze.
After the product launches, we can measure its success against the success metrics we defined. We throw a retrospective and get curious about the questions 'what worked well' and 'even better if?' For me, it's important to not only work out how to iterate the product but also our processes, people and design philosophy so we're constantly growing and improving.
Learn and adapt.
Once a product is created and out in the world it takes on a life force of its own, it’s always evolving. If we stay engaged and curious about the product it may just grow up to be extraordinary. Here are some words that have spoken to me along the way...
True grit. Zen simplicity. Direct honesty. Focused intentionality. Finesse all touchpoints. The relentless pursuit of better. Curiosity, generosity, openness, kindness.
