Director of Product Design

As a director of product design, I had an opportunity to lead a small team of talented product designers across a broad range of design initiatives. In my journey as a design leader, I was challenged with defining the practice of design from the ground up at a rapidly growing company and consistently delivering initiatives that exceed goals. I built a team, influenced strategy, leveled up designers, managed initiative timelines, established user centric processes and fostered cross functional collaboration. As a people manager, I lead with empathy, inspire with passion, and scale excellence through systems.
UX/UI Design • Responsive Design • UX Strategy • Mobile Apps • UX Research

What was the role of design?

Design was challenged with defining an impactful vision for digital products. The opportunity that we uncovered with our cross functional partners lead us to focus on technology that would enable the business to scale, streamline operations, maximize ROI, and help create a seamless customer experience between physical and digital products. Our strategic vision required us to weave a suite of digital products into a combined physical/digital product ecosystem.
As you continue down the page, I will highlight and detail 6 key initiatives: a multiphase e-commerce redesign, a virtual events platform, an inventory management tool, mobile member app, a design system, and a variety of operational systems focused on leveling up our design maturity.

Multiphase site redesign

The challenge: Redesign the existing flagship site into a fully responsive marketing machine to maximize acquisition, make content easy to update, lay a foundation for e-commerce, and increase inquiry form conversion.
Our approach: Design partnered closely with the marketing team throughout the entire process. We focused intensely on research to define the key customer segments. We conducted multiple workshops, comparative/competitive analysis sessions, stakeholder interviews, and customer interviews to identify user pain points as part of a comprehensive documentation of user journeys across multiple products. Next we analyzed and reviewed the findings with our cross functional partners and began ideation with a series of concept designs along with site mapping.
Due the scale of what we intended to accomplish, we broke the initiative into 4 phases: 1 Redesign main site into a marketing machine, 2 Redesign property details, 3 Create a checkout flow for membership products, and 4 create a member account management portal for all products.
The team: Myself and a Senior Product Designer teamed up to conduct all research and design.
The solution: Working with our cross functional partners, we identified key areas that we would focus on first and build a modular component based design system that would allow product/marketing to easily modify pages, create new pages, and conduct tests. Our efforts resulted in a 206% YOY conversion increase, along with sessions up by 40.6% and Contact Inquiries up 31.28%.
Below is my very first attempt at creating a wireframe and concept design to set the vision and tone for the new home page...

Final home page design

The final designs ended up being a combination of my initial concept design and our senior product designer’s branded concept exploration.
The components on the page were designed to be reordered from within our cms without the need of engineering. Throughout the experience we found opportunities to bake in limited customizable options for anyone updating content on a page. We wanted to maximize the scalability and flexibility of these pages so we could easily make updates to the experience based on usage analytics without engineering resources.

Landing page templates

With over 5 different products plus more coming soon, we needed to create a landing page system that would be consistent while allowing for variety and make it easy to spin up new pages. I directed our senior designer in the creation of our initial set of product landing page templates.

Inquiry form

Driving leads is one of the main goals of phase 1. Customer inquiries will ultimately count as conversions when measuring the usage data and serve as a key quality indicator of the user experience.

Property Search

I was tasked with finalizing our property search experience. Based on the company’s plan to add many more properties in the near future, I decided to push the designs in a direction that would scale better as more properties get added.

Rebrand concept designs

During the earlier stages of ideation, I noticed that the senior designer appeared to be struggling creatively with the existing brand guidelines. So I asked her to take stab at creating some concepts that push beyond the current brand. Which completely unlocked her creativity and resulted in a set of designs that the CEO and stakeholders loved. These designs ended up being merged with my initial concepts and reskinned in a simplified version of our current branding.

Rebrand landing page concepts

Rebrand photography vision

I directed the senior designer to go outside of our existing photos and find photos that capture the aesthetic and vision we aspire to have that best communicates the company brand.

Research & Analysis

We conducted an extensive amount of research that ranged from workshops, to interviews, to customer segmentation to journey mapping, to site mapping, to creating user flows, and documenting our analysis in the form of a deck. I had the team create a research deck as we analyzed the findings so we could easily share it with others to speed up future team member’s onboarding, to share with key stakeholders, and to build a solid research foundation for the future phases of the e-commerce initiative.

Site flow and site map sketches

Phase 1 Engineering Handoff file

To save time and reduce engineering frustration, I guided the senior designer to create a master delivery file that contained all of our ux design annotations, prototype links, research documentation, style guide and a library of components. This also helps with iterating on rounds of validation feedback(from users and stakeholders) by creating a single source of truth that can evolve holistically as feedback is gathered and acted on.

Property details page

Phase 2 of the redesign required bringing e-commerce into to focus with a redesign of the Property details page which also functions as a product detail page. Research and design of this phase was owned by Alicia our senior product designer and managed by myself. Alicia conducted multiple rounds of workshops, and interviews with the internal sales and marketing team to define a set of required features based on internal stake holder needs and customer pain points.
We were challenged with integrating a massive amount of featured content and product info across 4+ product offerings into a single property details page.
Below is part of our research and planning whiteboard that includes a research plan, a complete feature set and key takeaways.

Final designs

Phase 2 Engineering Handoff file

Continuing our practice of delivering a single source of truth, Alicia created a comprehensive handoff doc that was complete with ux design annotations, a component library and links to prototypes.

Membership landing page

Phase of 3 the site redesign had us focused on setting up membership as our first sellable product online. Membership was identified as the ideal product to launch our new e-commerce experience by product because of it’s reduced complexity. Alicia our senior product designer owned the research and design for creating new components for our membership landing page to allow customers to enter into the purchase flow for membership.

Checkout

The second part of phase 3 was led by Beth our newest product designer where she was able build off our existing research and initiate new research upon taking over the project. Under my close guidance Beth was tasked with creating a complete customer checkout flow along with creating a membership component that could be embedded on the home page or any landing page to allow users to purchase a membership.

Phase 3 Engineering Handoff file

The Portal

The last phase of the e-commerce redesign was the creation of the customer portal.
The challenge: With 5+ service based products being sold to customers and e-commerce sales being added we need a means to foster transparency, build loyalty, and empower customers to manage their accounts themselves.
The solution: Establish a single admin portal for all customers that would allow them to manage billing, manage their account, manage members, book meetings, invite guests, order food, upsell products and engage in community events.
The team: Senior product designer Alicia and myself conducted initial research and discovery. However, I took ownership of the portal experience to complete research and design.

site map

Portal Research and analysis deck

Portal Feature set by product

Portal Log in & Create account

Portal Home page Iterations

Portal Billing Management

Portal Team member management

Portal invoice payments

Portal Profile management

Portal usage data + timeline planning concepts

Portal Research and Planning whiteboard

Portal Delivery file

Work Suite Member APP

The challenge: Empower work suite members to make the most of available services from a mobile device.
The solution: The work suite app is a native iOS and Android app that allows work suite members to book meeting rooms, invite guests, sign up for community events and get help. This app established a foundation for paying for rooms on the app, ordering food, and way finding.
The design team: I had complete ownership of this project.

App Community events

App meeting room booking

App guest registration

App food ordering Concept

App Meeting Room Booking Direct pay Concept

App Research and Validation

We conducted a signifigant amount of research, ideation and validation activities to create the work suite app...from workshops to user interviews to executive reviews to whiteboarding flow reviews to usabiliy testing to engineering reviews.

Virtual Events Platform

The challenge: During the pandemic no one was meeting in physical spaces which was the main focus of the business. So we needed to create a new means of earning revenue until the physical business could comeback. We had about 3 months to spin up a completely new virtual meetings and events business.
The solution: Create a virtual space where customers can continue to hold events and Allow customers to use their own branding to create customizable event sites for hosting those virtual events. Leveraging patterns and styles from our existing design system, we created a customizable responsive event site that allowed customers to register, sign in, chat with attendees, and participate in virtual events. The virtual event business generated about $1 million in the first 3 months and about $10 million in revenue during it’s first year.
The design team: Our Mid-level product designer Gina owned this initiative with contributions from Katerina our senior product designer and myself on design direction/research/strategy.

Event home page

Mainstage event page

Event Attendee Profile

Event login + registration flow

Event Journey mapping

Virtual events platform: Session Player Video Conferencing

The challenge: Replace our dependency on Zoom for the virtual events platform breakout sessions.
The solution: Create a responsive web based custom video conferencing app built off of Amazon chime that can be used for virtual and hybrid event breakout sessions. Lay a foundation for self-serve customer moderation to manage their own sessions during events.
The design team: I had complete ownership of this project.

Session Closed captioning + networking

Session Timeout screens + assigning breakout groups

Session settings

Session Moderator view

Session Mobile

Session Chat

Availability tool for inventory management

The availability tool is a custom built react enterprise application that is connected with Salesforce that is used by the sales team to manage and find inventory that meets customer’s needs for meetings and events.
The challenge: We had two weeks to complete research, design and deliver an inventory management application that better meets the needs of the sales team than the existing inventory software.
The solution: Week 1 - research. Week 2 - design. Week 3 - deliver to engineering and start usability testing with sales to validate the experience while engineering builds the MVP. Week 4 and 5 prioritize feedback with product management and apply updates to designs for handoff to engineering after the MVP is complete.
The team: I had complete ownership of this project.

Design System

Establishing a design system was one of the very first foundational projects that I completed in my first year. After validating the design system with our marketing team partners we next established a figma based design system. The last design system initiative was partnering with engineering to translate our system into a React component library.

Design Operations

Throughout my time leading design, I pushed for documenting, systemizing, and testing new patterns that produced positive results for the team. Leveraging operational systems can help a team to scale success, level up design maturity and operate more efficiently.

Product strategy map

After spending some time researching product vision, I came across the idea of a strategy map that was being used by financial companies. I then applied the map idea to product to help the team to align on high level strategy and give cross functional partners insight into how we operate.

end to end product process map

In order to improve cross functional process between Engineering Product and Design, I worked with a team of engineers, product managers and designers to workshop an end to end process work flow for creating a product.

Design resource planning

I created a simple system in Figma to visualize the design team’s availability, give transparency into resource availability, and to plan roadmap initiatives against resource availability with product managers. I know there are other apps out there that allow for timeline planning, but this saved us from having to add another application to our budget and was easy for everyone to use.

Customer Segmentation

Understanding your users is the first step in building products with elevated user experiences. With each initiative, we collected our research to incrementally build out a knowledge base of customer and business insights.

Design thinking tool box

I wanted to create a design thinking activity quick reference guide for designers and product managers to help reinforce design thinking methods by empowering them to easily find the right tool for the job.

Welcoming folks to the team

For new team members, I had a custom t-shirt made with a color that was only used for design team members along with a hand written note that I fedex out before they start.

Onboarding

Every new team member gets a detailed onboarding doc to help them through their first few weeks. I also schedule a series of 1:1 meetings with their new product and engineering colleagues.

Saying goodbye

Since we all worked togehter during the pandemic there was no way to get a farewell card properly signed by everyone...so I created a farewell instagram account that team members could sign which also went along with flowers and a plant we sent to their home. I’ve always felt it is important to say goodbye with the same amount of gratitude as when we welcome someone to the team.

Design for engineering team logo

I worked with the CTO to create a series of potential team logos for the engineering team. Taking a little extra time to use my design skills to foster cross functional team building helps build trust and strengthen relationships.