Portfolio: Interactive & Transactional Systems

S1

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.

Rimadyl.com

We were retained by an Atlanta-based Marketing and Interactive Agency to quickly evaluate the usability and, to some extent, the appeal of two special-purpose web sites for Pfizer Animal Health.

The products reviewed for this assessment were in-development versions of Rimadyl.com and Rimadog.com.  Rimadyl.com was (and still is) a static information site designed to educate consumers and veterinarians on Rimadyl, a canine arthritis drug. 

Rimadog.com was an interactive online community of pet owners and their “RimaDogs.”  Rimadog.com was intended to be a fun place where stories and videos are shared, rebates requests are managed, and dog games and activities are enjoyed. It appears as if Rimadog.com (the online community with fun stuff) either never went live or has been taken off-line, but Pfizer does still own the domain. Some of the content of Rimadog.com is now part of Rimadyl.com (the more "all business" site)

Test Objectives

The goal of this evaluation was to conduct a "Level 2" Expert Review of the described Products.  Expert Review is a method for quick evaluation of a user interface design.  Expert Review is done as a systematic inspection of a user interface design for usability. The goal of Expert Review is to find the usability problems in the design so that they can be attended to as part of an iterative design process. Expert Review involves having a small set of evaluators examine the interface and judge its compliance with recognized usability principles.  In the case of a Level 2 Expert Review, 3 evaluators are used.

Method

Each evaluator from the Assessment Team (Brad Wiederholt, Dr. Don Rickert and Dr. Jesse Zolna) reviewed the pre-release versions of the websites, starting with the home pages and interacting with site pages when possible (note: not all pages were functional). 

Each evaluator used WARP3 Insights 23-Point Usability Checklist for the assessment.  The 23-point checklist contains approximately 200 sub-criteria. For each of the 23 criteria and supporting sub-criteria, the evaluator noted if a) the site met the condition, b) the site did not meet the condition, or c) the condition did not apply to the sites reviewed.  When the site did not meet a condition, the evaluator made notes of the particular offending pages or site structures.  Also captured were any items that required special discussion.  When applicable, supporting screen shots were captured and included in a formal report.

Our feeling about the type of Expert Usability Review we did was that, in a pinch, it is far better than nothing, but nowhere near as useful as true Usability Testing involving actual potential users of the product(s), in this case, two web sites. Nevertheless, the Rimadyl.com site is not too bad, but has a few "rough edges." Its use of video on only a single page is amateurish in implementation, given the rich media tools available.

American Systems Corporation

Wiederholt & Rickert Partners, LLC (DBA WARP3Insights) was retained by Thoughtmill, Inc., which had recently been acquired by American Systems Corporation, a Washington, D.C.-based technology consulting firm whose clientèle are primarily U.S. Government Agencies, some which cannot be mentioned. In other words, they do a lot of top secret work. This made for an interesting engagement, since we could only see content which did not require a security clearance. We were retained due to the fact that Thoughtmill, whose clientèle are primarily corporations, needed a second opinion from experts approved by ASC.

The Project:

This is very difficult project to describe. I will attempt to be a brief as possible. The project consisted of several main components:

• Competitive Landscape Analysis

Reviewing the other important players in the Washington technology consulting arena and making recommendations to make the ASC website better than the rest. Better for this type of site is not what is typically written about in usability articles and textbooks. Here, better refers to a higher likelihood of being scored higher than the competitors by Government procurement officers. Our task boiled down to ascertaining how quality and value are assessed by reviewing carefully what the successful competitors are doing on their websites and, more importantly, distilling our discoveries into actionable insights for design and organization of content. Don's and Brad's prior experience working with Government contractors (sometimes called "Beltway Bandits") and knowing a lot of people in the business was quite valuable for this part of the consulting engagement.

• Navigation, Information Architecture & Terminology

This component was all about coming up with the right terminology and categorization (navigational hierarchy) for the website. Firms that do business with Federal agencies have a completely different jargon than those working with corporations. There are enough acronyms to make the heads of the faint of heart spin. We also helped to design a really nice site map that made it easy for the target audience to find all of the right buzz words.

• Design Guidance and Best Practices (within the client's world)

A major goal was for the ASC website to be appealing to its users. To reiterate, these users are primarily Federal agency procurement officers. Please trust me when I tell you that what is appealing to a procurement officer is not necessarily the same as the average person. There was a notion within our client organization that lots of Flash/Shockwave would spice up what is, by any standards, really dry material. Our advice was to be sparing in its use unless there was usability information value in its use.

We performed what was requested of us pretty well and the site is up and running, helping ASC to win contracts, and so forth. The use of Flash is still a bit gratuitous but not too far over the line of good taste. Check out the site for yourselves, but don't even try to understand what they are talking about. That is, of course, unless you are an agency procurement officer.