During my 7+ year tenure at S1 Corporation (provider of technology solutions for the financial industry), starting out as Manager of an 8-person User Interface Design & Usability Group, and culminating as Global Director of Customer Insights, UX and UI Design Standards, I had the chance to perform many duties, hands-on as well as managerial.
A summary of my work is as follows:
- Responsible for the TOTAL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE for a wide range of financial technology products and Official “Evangelist” for company-wide User-Centered Design, including company-wide User Interaction Standards (i.e. Style Guides)
- Organized collaboration of diverse UI design & development teams in locations around the world (Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Los Angeles, Boston, Ireland, U.K. and India)
- Oversight of Use Case development by Business Analysts, Functional Requirements and Marketing Requirements Documents (MRDs) by Product Managers
- Formalized Consumer Research, including ethnography and field interviewing, in the Product Development Process, VERY IMPORTANT in an Engineering-Centric Company like S1.
- Introduction and standardization of a number of new/better customer research methods, including online card-sorting, ethnographic methods, online testing, true quantitative (i.e. beyond pie charts) analysis of surveys.
- Introduced a User Experience Pattern-Based approach to product development. This became very effective way to distill years of usability testing, ethnography and other research (such as terminology, pricing studies, etc.) findings into a specific, actionable form that could drive design of a large and diverse product catalog.
- Established visual attractiveness and emotional appeal as quality criteria
It took many years, surviving countless reorganizations and organizational turmoil to eventually establish the power and influence to make all of the above happen. A lot of products that provided less than an excellent User Experience were produced by essentially renegade engineering groups along the way, but I am proud of several of the product lines that my team and I were able to affect, thanks largely to the Engineering Project Managers who "got it" and cooperated.
Probably my biggest accomplishment was getting User-Centered Design and UX oversight incorporated into S1's official product development process, a version of RUP (Rational Unified Process), which was formalized pretty late in the game.
