1. Tell us how you've worked with developers in the past to ensure that your solutions are clearly understood and implemented as designed?

When possible, I prefer to communicate with developers throughout the design process. It gets everyone on the same page from the onset, and I find incorporating feedback early and often helps me create better, more efficient solutions.

Once a design is ready for handoff, I generally walk through the experience with the developers using designs or prototypes, and answering any questions. I then create multiple files to show user flow, logic, design specs, and states. These are either shared in Zeplin or directly via Figma. If there is a complex interaction that needs additional context, I will make a brief movie walking through the interaction with prototypes or online examples.

When the developers have a solution in a testable state, I will do UAT to capture any bugs and prioritize fixes based on user impact. 

2. What steps would you take in your first 2 weeks on the job to ensure you're successful? 

In order to hit the ground running, there are a few things I would do before my first day:

• Research similar companies to develop an understanding of the overall healthcare portal landscape

• While my perspective is fresh, explore the desktop portal and capture any issues I encounter or questions I have as a new user

• Explore the ecosystem of Navigating Care products to identify questions and opportunities I see as a new user

• Re-familiarize myself with Sketch and Zeplin (I have been using Figma for the past year)

Given that we will likely be working remotely for an indeterminate amount of time, in the first 2 weeks I would set up virtual meetings to try to soak up as much information as I can. I would plan to;

• Meet with Jesse to talk about preferred working style, long and short term goals, walk through the product, and get recommendations on who to meet with

• Meet with customer/clinic success managers to better understand user needs

• Meet with product and engineering to discuss goals, preferred working style, and short term priorities

• Meet with the other designers for an overview on current design resources (libraries, style guides, files) and projects they’re working on, recommendations on who to talk to, and begin hand-off on any existing projects they want me to own

• If there are multiple projects, work with Jesse & product to prioritize work

• Set up time & cadence to follow-up on open questions

• Research the user, build understanding of key constituents (patients, clinicians), and begin exploring how to build and navigate those relationships. 

3. Tell us about a time you had to move forward on design direction/implementation when you lacked sufficient feedback or data?

At zulily, it was common to be given projects with vague goals. One such project was creating an SEO landing page for new customers. Our CEO wanted the page to be “better”, but didn’t clarify what that meant. 

I began by exploring what the page should be doing. I researched SEO best practices, conducted a competitive analysis to understand what other companies included on their pages, and analyzed how the zulily experience stacked up. Once I had an idea of what the job of the page should be, I ran those ideas past stakeholders in SEO, onboading, marketing, and design. Through conversations and quickly-sketched ideas, we identified the following goals for the page: 

• provide the customer with content relevant to their initial search term

• introduce cross-category shopping

• create avenues to continue shopping

• introduce zulily’s discovery shopping model & value proposition

Designing the visuals was a little more challenging. Our CEO had strong opinions about how things should “look” and “feel”, but often was unable to communicate what he wanted without high fidelity designs to respond to. I started by presenting three distinct concepts and tracking his response to each — sometimes it was a specific picture he didn’t like, sometimes it was the layout. Through the process of incorporating his feedback and iterating, we were able to land on a design that worked for him and the stakeholders. 

4. How do you present work and get stakeholder buy-in when more formal reviews are a time-challenge?

When possible, I’ve found in-person conversations are the quickest way to capture feedback and get buy-in. If significant decisions have been made in a one-on-one conversation, I’ll often send a follow-up email to all stakeholders to ensure the decision and reasoning is communicated.

Given the new COVID situations, I might try to schedule quick zoom calls, or use online conversation tools (Slack, Mattermost).

5. Tell us about how you had to solve an information architecture problem. What process and validation techniques did you use, and what was the result?  (If you haven’t, then how would you go about solving?)

When designing a Q&A feature for Expedia, I used IA and content strategy to determine what content needed to be in place to give users answers they considered credible and trustworthy. 

Process: 

1. Create an inventory of content found in competitor Q&A features.

2. Identify the “job” of the content and create shared definitions to use internally. Look at what job we think we want to do with an Expedia Q&A, and map content accordingly.

3. In the meantime, we conducted a study to determine what type of content users needed to trust an answer. We found that users were more interested in what question had been asked than in who asked the question or when. Knowing who answered the questions, their credentials, and how recently the answer was given was far more important.

4. I incorporated those findings into the design.

5. Validate: We conducted another study asking users to complete various tasks with an interactive prototype I’d built. We looked for any instances where the user was confused or experienced friction trying to complete the task. 

6. Result: In this case, the prototype tested well and we moved forward with building the final Q&A feature. Tests are ongoing, but are so far have led to higher engagement, and surprisingly, higher calls to customer service (reducing calls was one of our success metrics). Conversion numbers are inconclusive.

Side note: Though card sorting wasn’t used for this project, it’s such a useful tool for categorizing information and creating site navigation that I wanted to give it a shout out.