Case Studies

User experience, design, and digital strategy projects

Wiley

I began working with Wiley to help them institute their ambitious A/B testing initiatives and to conduct user experience testing. Using third party tools like Optimizely, heat mapping software and ethnographic UX research, we began testing alternative designs for their marketing sites and ecommerce checkout. These user experience tests formed the basis of the current Wiley websites which my company helped to build. I worked with a team of marketers and IT professionals at Wiley to design and implement a new workflow for all of their digital properties, instituting weekly standups and standard GIT branching procedures. I oversaw the user experience design to transform the print-based Architectural Graphic Standards from Wiley Publishing as a responsive web app that could display all formats effectively and introduced a user experience that made it easy to search within hundreds of pages of dense content and footnotes.

The 9/11 Memorial and Museum

The 9/11 Museum and Memorial was launching a special exhibition featuring work from New York-based artists reacting to the events of September 11th. I worked with the museum to design the user experience and build the interactive digital kiosks that accompanied the exhibition and to build an iPad app for visitors, as well as creating the website for the exhibition. The challenge was that all the content on the digital kiosks needed to be able to be changed quickly and remotely in case of controversy. Working with the exhibitions staff, I designed a user experience for the kiosks. Then I supervised a team of designers and developers to build the kiosk software as a web app that used application storage for all digital assets and animations, meaning that the kiosks had the responsiveness and speed of a native app, but they could be updated with new content any moment of the day in minutes.

BAM-X

I was approached by a Series A start-up that wanted to build a business monetizing links in fashion websites. They asked us to design an interface for their product that would simplify a complex bidding platform for sellers and buyers (similar to Google Ad Words). I worked with the founders to create a user experience that maintained consistency and branding across multiple functional screens. In the end, the product was so complex, we designed over forty distinct page types.

S&P Capital IQ

S&P Capital IQ is a huge financial research and technology company. Like many large companies, they have an award-winning design and development group on staff. But after a major product redesign and a rebranding initiative, they approached me to help to translate the redesign into a user experience on their digital properties. I worked closely with their marketing and design groups, becoming a virtual extension of their internal resources. My team of designers and I helped to streamline design elements across hundreds of pages, creating browser-based animations and consulting on a new digital advertising campaign. We also helped concept and design the animations for a new web series featuring their analysts.

Decor NYC

Decor NYC is a brick and mortar store with a unique ecommerce challenge. Because their inventory is entirely high end furniture consigned by wealthy individuals, their ecommerce platform needed to support thousands and thousands of unique SKU's. I worked with the founder to design and build a platform capable of accommodating this incredible range of merchandise in an easy-to-navigate and discoverable form. I also designed and built the submission tool that allowed people interested in consigning furniture to do so online.

Out of Home

The Outdoor Association of America felt that out of home media wasn't getting enough media dollars. I worked with their agency to come up with a campaign that would drive media professionals to a website that would demonstrate that OOH advertising drives higher engagement than digital. I designed and built the site in order to drive high levels of engagement among media professionals. Since engagement metrics were the proof the site was designed from the outset for maximum measurability. The campaign ended up winning an Effie (an advertising effectiveness award).

Chadwick Bell

I worked with the founders of start-up fashion brand Chadwick Bell to design and build their website. Although the brand was well-funded, it was being launched by young designers without an extensive distribution network. They needed a site that would communicate the mood of the brand, feel fashion-forward, and have an easy-to-use ecommerce component. In addition to consumers, the site needed to serve buyers for department stores who have different needs and questions. I designed the site to have a flat navigation with detailed product information available in as few clicks as possible.

Predictwise

Predictwise is a project from a team of economists at Microsoft Research that collects and analyzes data from prediction markets in order to anticipate likely events (political elections, sports championships, Oscar winners, etc.) Microsoft identified Predictwise as a potential monetization opportunity and the team reached out to me to help turn an academic project into a consumer product. Working with the team at Microsoft and my team of designers, we redesigned the user experience from the ground up, using established data visualization frameworks, simplified the interface and introduced a responsive grid system for better mobile display. Based on that initial success, I continue to work with the Predictwise team designing new digital tools to increase the efficiency of their data collection and polling.

LeEco

The massive Chinese consumer electronics conglomerate LeEco was planning on entering the US market and needed a group of sites that could introduce their brands to unfamiliar consumers. I worked with their fast-growing marketing team to design the sites. Discovery and approvals were complicated by the fact that Chinese companies have different user experience practices and most decisions needed to be run through China. In the end, we all worked together effectively to create designs that the entire team could support.

Honeycomb

Five Acre Farms had a paper problem. As a fast growing consumer packaged goods company supplying major supermarkets with local eggs, dairy and apple products throughout the northeast, they had an active salesforce going out to meet with store managers and check on inventory and expiration dates. However, their method for tracking all of these contacts was paper and email based. Thousands and thousands of store reports went unread and they had trouble identifying and fixing problem stores or problematic suppliers. Working with their founder, I designed and oversaw the development of an integrated phone-based web app that allowed their sales reps to enter and submit reports on their smartphones and a desktop dashboard that allowed management to instantly identify problems, address issues and maintain constant real-time awareness of their entire distribution network.

Cableboxer

Cableboxer is an app that helps consumers get rid of their cable provider by providing alternatives based upon individual zip code and personal viewing habits. But when the service launched, people were waiting too long to get their recommendations. After reviewing the existing user experience, database and algorithm, I recommended to the company founder that the entire system be rebuilt from scratch. Then I supervised my team of designers and developers as we redesigned the interface and built a new, more extensive database and powerful new algorithm to generate faster, more accurate results. When Cableboxer relaunched, average wait times fell by more than two thirds and the advanced analytics and data layer we added could immediately identify bottlenecks.