My natural lens on the world is one through which I see puzzle pieces and the way they fit together. Finding and communicating the relationship between the 'big picture' and its constituent parts is what enables me to find and tell great stories and identify the best strategies to solve a problem (not to mention predict potential problems).
Easing Parent Anxiety (2016)
As AltSchool grew, teachers reported having to spend more and more time communicating with individual parents. In parallel, parents reported feeling neglected, under-informed, and lacking information about their children's progress.
Combining the results of three separate projects - an ethnographic study on how teachers spend their time, a card sorting exercise on student goals, and an interview-based study on parent communication - I found that parents were, in fact, inundated with information from too many touch points but with the wrong type of information.
Using this insight, I worked with designers and PMs to build a tool that made updating parents quick and easy for teachers by sending class-wide updates, while making parents feel as though they had a personalized experience. The tool helped build a productive dialogue between parents and teachers - easing parents’ anxiety and saving teachers time.
Building Trust with Customers (2017)
The pharmaceutical and insurance worlds are incredibly complex and largely opaque for consumers. In conducting research for a pharmaceutical delivery company, I identified that the greatest barrier to on-boarding new users was less an issue of usability. Rather, the barriers were a lack of understanding of the problem the app was solving and of trust in an unknown brand to guide them through a process that was unclear.
I encouraged the team to think more expansively about the customer experience than focusing solely on UX design. We iterated on the use of language and context to grow trust and drive interest in providing the necessary personal information. I recommended employing devices such as presenting a challenge for them to meet and increasing frictions at points in order to create transparency and build trust.