Experience

 

As the sole User Experience Architect on the Marketing and Communications team at Johns Hopkins Medicine, I'm fortunate to have the opportunity to contribute to a variety of departmental efforts. My work is informed by both quantitative and qualitative user testing, conducted in-person and online. Through these methods, I've organized and consolidated large sections of www.hopkinsmedicine.org, designed templates, page layouts, and content entry mechanisms (UX/UI design within the CMS through page components/modules), and worked on all the user-centered aspects of migrating thousands of pages and dozens of components from one CMS to another. I've also contributed to our SEO, SEM, search, and social media priorities.

Some of my work is for patients, some for medical students, and some for medical professionals, each with different goals. Sometimes my clients are my co-workers. When we create standards for our site or design modules for our templates, our content editors and production specialists are the users and experts. I look to them for input and feedback through user testing. I work with them to understand how and why we're where we are. Communicating the results is an important step in my process, and I often deliver the results as trainings to my colleagues.

I'm also the lead for Voice of the Customer (VOC) research. This research analyzes site visitor feedback through a variety of means, including our site survey, user testing, data-visualization tools, and Google Analytics.

To me, the key to user experience work is empathy. I consider not only the users' needs but also their resources, encompassed by the acronym PIMTECT (people, information, materials, tools, energy, capital, and time). These resources play an important role in how I approach my own work.

Ask me about:

  • Empathy

  • Compromise

  • Aligning business goals and user needs

User Experience Architect III

Johns Hopkins Medicine, Baltimore, MD

 

Digital Manager

Weber Shandwick, Baltimore, MD

 

When I began at Weber Shandwick, I had the opportunity to work on multiple aspects of many campaigns: content delivery and a CMS guide for the Anheuser-Busch Newsroom, strategy and user experience for Priority Health’s Digital Magazine and strategy and design/UX for Request for Proposals (RFPs). I also had the opportunity to write Technology Specification documents, give input on Statements of Work (SOWs) and manage outreach and education for Maryland Health Benefit Exchange’s second open enrollment period (the Affordable Care Act in Maryland). Working on many project-fronts and communicating with different types of stakeholders helped evolve my user experience design going forward. I made connections with the skills I had used in my past careers and found new ways to apply others within the industry.

My position as Digital Manager was focused on User Experience. Not only was I creating audience personas, user flows, site maps and annotated wireframes, I was also responsible for workflow through the Discovery and Design phases. To test my designs (and others’ designs), I made clickable prototypes with Solidify, from ZURB, and Axure. Sometimes I was asked to be part of the Quality Assurance (QA) Testing and sometimes I had to ask to participate but doing a final “once over” in the DEV environment allowed me to check the overall feel and flow of the site as I was making sure buttons, animations, etc. functioned as I had detailed (on specific devices, browsers versions, and so on).

Being part of Weber Shandwick was a great experience. Day to day, I hope I helped everyone in the Baltimore office as much as they helped me. Working with their national and global networks was truly invaluable and the opportunity to work with their clientele has helped me shape my User Experience Design, its process and deliverables, to suit the most rigid clients.

Ask me about:

  • User Experience

  • How process can be a life saver

Technology Education Teacher

Maritime Charter School, Buffalo, NY
Chesapeake High School, Pasadena, MD
Howard High School, Ellicott City, MD

Teaching high school was one of the most rewarding and tiring experiences of my life. I began at the age of 26 with more “worldly experience” than most new teachers but no one gets to stop learning. In 5 years of teaching, the biggest challenge I had was growing my ability to provide differentiated instruction – instructional methods that allow for deviation based on students’ different strengths and learning styles. Building understanding and designing projects with differentiated instruction has crossed the boundary of education and become something I employ in my user experience work and my everyday life. It has given me the ability to communicate with many different audiences including multiple audiences at one time.

Ask me about:

  • Teaching

  • Kids and power tools

  • Managing expectations from students, their parents and administration

  • Developing projects from start to finish (that the State has to OK)

Personal Banker

Bank of America, San Francisco Main Office

I moved to San Francisco after I graduated college and worked here opening accounts, selling mortgages and talking to everyone about their refinancing options. What I learned was that there is a direct correlation between research and being taken seriously. (I immediately used something I majored in in college – unexpected and fantastic.) I was a 23 year old in San Francisco’s business district talking to seasoned business professionals, of all sorts, about their finances, mortgage(s) and potential for other investments.

Ask me about:

  • Moving to San Francisco at 23 from a town with more cows than people

  • How I handle a steep learning curve