My design process
Design is about identifying the right problems to solve, building alignment, and inspiring creativity.
Embracing user-centered design and making data-informed decisions, my goal is to understand the problem to solve to do the right thing. With clarity and focus, you can empower teams cross-discipline and beyond to align and create impact. One of my passions is enabling my design peers and my teammates to be supported in any way possible to always understand the why. Throughout my career, I’ve been able to jump-start this in multiple ways.
Being data-driven with research
Developing personas
For the redesign of Blizzard Entertainment’s company intranet, I supported several research initiatives like ethnographic shadowing to contextually understand the day-to-day of several Blizzard Entertainment employees in Irvine Headquarters and around the world. This research allowed the team to develop five personas which the Corp Apps team uses to empathizing and informing design decisions for enterprise tools. Since then, this established the use of proto-personas across multiple productsand initiatives to always frame problems and design decisions around our users.
Building empathy through user interviews
Throughout my time at Blizzard Entertainment, one of the most effective ways of developing empathy and alignment is conducting interviews with our known users for a product. This allowed the team to gather qualitative data about how our users think, feel, know, and react to certain things. Additionally, it can provide clarity on what problems and challenges, from their perspective, they experience from processes and tools. This research activity has been fundamental in creating artifacts such as insight statements and personas. In leading these activities, I was responsible for setting an interview plan, identifying goals, scheduling, moderation, and analysis. I strive to make this a cross-discipline activity, as multiple perspectives can listen and learn different things from our users, bringing those valuable insights back to the team.
Conducting usability testing and analysis
Throughout my career, I have participated, facilitated, and created usability test plans to gather qualitative and quantitative feedback. At Crowdstrike and latter years at Blizzard Entertainment, I partnered closely with a research partner to determine the best activities to support questions to answer or assumptions to validate. Other times, I would take the initiative to create, lead, and facilitate testing for a given project. Feedback is essential to ensure the team is on the right track and reducing any risk by validating ideas. This can also help a team build confidence in what’s being delivered but also create empathy with the user and understand their point of view.
For a small team like Product Design within Corp Apps, a common practice was conducting usability testing in the form of task-based interviews. During my time with the team, I created templates to standardized the testing format well as a reporting matrix to show task success across all users. This visualization helps inform the critical features to address for products the development team is working on. I’ve also had the privilege of traveling to their regional offices in Austin, Versailles, and Seoul to meet our users and test Blizzard Entertainment’s enterprise tools!
Building alignment through process
Facilitating design thinking and collaborative workshops
Whether it’s with the design team, a cross-discipline development team for a product, or a larger audience - collaboration is paramount in creating delightful solutions of high value to our users, meet business needs, and are feasible (and reasonable) to build.
During my time at Crowdstrike and Blizzard Entertainment, as both a project and design lead, I have been responsible for creating and facilitating a variety of workshops to help teams align on a problem, brainstorm ideas, or collaboration on solutions. Some of these activities include :
Brainstorm and sketching sessions: generate as many ideas as possible with a variety of disciplines.
Discovery sessions: to understand the current state and align on how to approach the problem.
Feedback sessions: to hear the thoughts and opinions of the team in an organized, structured way.
Prioritization and planning sessions: to align and commit based on what’s feasible.
Google Design Sprints: to understand, ideate, prototype, test in a rapid fashion.
Producing internal programs
In 2017, Product User Groups was a program developed internally at Blizzard Entertainment as an employee-driven group who Corp Apps engages with on a regular cadence for feedback and testing. This was in an effort to increase research participation and have the department engage proactively with our users.
One of the Product Design team’s core objectives is engaging with employees to collect feedback on our products; whether it’s measuring usability, value, or sentiment. The method of recruitment was limited since the team did not have an active, up-to-date participant pool. In the past, the team gathered feedback from past surveys conducted or recommending individuals to connect with. This made it challenging to identify who to recruit, schedule, and execute research activities in a short time-frame.
With these challenges in mind, I approached Corp Apps and IT senior leadership with a proposal on how Product Design could facilitate getting proactive feedback from our community. With that came Product User Groups, which is a group of employees across global offices that would actively participate in providing feedback and testing every quarter. This group is based off the five Corp Apps personas to help validate our design decisions.
As of 2019 since the program was established, the team has completed five seasons of PUG with the program revamp underway. This group has heavily influenced design decisions and directions for various internal products including the company intranet, service management tool, visitor experience, events management, and more.