A designer specializing in
User Experience for SaaS/PaaS
Turning complex problems into simple, intuitive, and beautiful designs while increasing retention and engagement.
Identifying a market opportunity, clearly defining the problem statement, and developing the right solution while using the problem statement as a guiding star to ensure features and functionality answer the question and are serving their intended purpose.
View ProcessExperience of User Experience
I'm always in design thinking mode, empathizing with the users, identifying their needs, and defining the problem we are trying to solve. Then providing deliverables like wireframes and prototypes so that they can test the solution.
Discovery
Understanding the current process is critical. Proper research of the product is essential, along with conducting a business analysis, content audit, interviewing users, and surveying.
Personas
Who are you solving for? A question answered with well thought out personas that identify your typical user and outline their age, occupation, goals, etc, in order to build empathy.
Plan
Develop workflows, journey maps and/or storyboards to foster discussion, ideate, and foresee roadblocks, creating an experience that is relative to our users' goals, needs, and expectations.
Design
Wireframes are the architectural blueprint, and mock-ups add personality and induce emotions in our users. The interface must be appealing to all users with a good color scheme, a balanced ratio of content to white space, and purposed placement.
Test
Prototyping and testing designs on the right people are the last and most crucial step. Neutrality is practiced when testing the viability of a solution, never guide or suggest, and let them contribute to the product allowing their feedback to shape the final solution.
Iterate
Usability issues are even present, and it is impossible to design a perfect interface, the first time. Therefore, I implement the Iterative development of interfaces and the steady refinement of the design, driven by user testing and feedback, to improve usability continuously.
Education and Certifications
I attended the International Academy of Design and Technology for five years and completed the Bachelor in Arts for Visual Communications coursework and have a Six Sigma Green Belt Certification.*
A History of Designing User Experiences
Throughout my career, I have successfully launched over 30+ projects from a variety of industries, including manufacturing, healthcare, government, commercial real estate, and entertainment. These projects ranged from native apps, SaaS/PaaS, B2B/B2C enterprise-level applications, and AI platforms.
Director of Product Design
& User Experience
SiteZeus
November 2017 to Present
I spearhead the Innovation, user experience, UI, and design QA efforts for our Synergy™ and Savvy™ Platforms. With the help of our support and development team, I collect and interpret qualitative research data, interpret the findings to provide a seamless customer journey throughout the SiteZeus® platforms while increasing revenue, continuously improving the user experience and overseeing feature design implementation. My goal is to continue to increase revenue via updating our current workflows, lead designers/PLs on the innovation of new valuable/consumable data features, and while maintaining an accurate pattern library that allows our developers to work quickly and efficiently.
Show More Show LessSr. User Experience Designer Consultant
Nielsen Company
December 2017 to June 2018
I was an integral part of the UX delivery team, focusing on solving the tough human-computer interaction challenges faced by end-users for Connected Systems. As a UX Designer, I leveraged Nielsen patterns, models, and standards to build efficient and straightforward user interactions with an attention to detail, usability, branding, and visual aesthetics. Some of my daily challenges required having a solid understanding of user desires and behavior while developing a robust architecture around our applications, building prototypes, and working with developers and product leaders to convert solutions into efficient, accurate, and timely deliverables.
Show More Show LessPrincipal User Experience Consultant
& Team Mentor
Cardinal Solutions Group
August 2014 to December 2017
As a principal designer, I evangelized Cardinal's UX best practices and get involved with business initiatives to help increase revenue. I met with clients, development teams, and business leaders to discuss their vision for new solutions and leverage discovery research, new technologies, to create compelling digital/virtual experiences and user-centered designs. I completed over enterprise 8+ projects, streamlined/managed UX processes, which decreased user research timeframe from avg. 1 week to 2-3 days and created widely implemented comprehensive discovery presentations. While at Cardinal, I led the design and implementation of various POC's, which won the Cardinal over 60% of their yearly revenue.
Show More Show LessLead Sr. User Experience Designer
Elm Resources
August 2013 to July 2014
As the lead UX designer, I built an in-depth understanding of user privacy compliance and the internal loan processes of the banks/universities we serve. At an expert level, I provided solutions for complex navigation and information hierarchy challenges at a system level while also supporting a robust/fully-responsive user-facing experience. With the ElmOne™ platform, my primary focus consisted of visualizing, modifying, and communicating student data via multiple complex task-flows, which would branch off into over 30+ use cases of the product and system, that had to be solved. Creating personas, experience maps, and user journeys helped me identify/discover pain points and opportunities within the ElmOne™ experience. In turn, this allowed me to develop fully functional wireframes and UI prototypes, delivering solutions in the form of user interaction summaries, UI specifications, wireframes, and prototypes.
Show More Show LessSr. Mobile UX Designer
Mad Mobile
February 2012 to June 2013
As the lead mobile designer, I led mobile design deliverables and act as the mediator between user needs and business objectives. I would also translate usability and user research findings into a tangible design and communicated design recommendations and rationale to key stakeholders at all levels. While here, I participated and led proof of concepts that won Mad Mobile over one mil in revenue.
Show More Show LessLead Sr. Interaction & UX Designer
The New York Times Company
August 2010 to February 2012
I developed a UX strategy for the interfaces of the National Newspapers of New York Times Regional Media Group, for both mobile and desktop. During my time with NYT, I was directly tasked with defining key objectives, style guidelines, and best practices as a part of a companywide strategy-focused redesign effort. Increased engagement on more than 12 of the core products by implementing responsive design and establishing a testing model for mobile and native role outs.
Show More Show LessRecommendations
Applications and Frameworks
I'm a three-pronged designer who can conduct UX research, take the outcome of the investigation and translate it to a beautiful design, and develop a fully functional and pixel perfect codebase.
User Experience
I use industry-standard applications to conduct my user experience studies and product workflows, storyboards, wireframes, and documents.
- Lucidchart
- Microsoft® Office o365
- Survey Monkey
- Pendo
- Axure
Visual Design
When creating style guides and high-fidelity mock-ups, I prefer to use Adobe Creative Suite, but I can use other design applications if subscriptions not available.
- Adobe® Experience Design
- Adobe® Illustrator
- Adobe® Photoshop
- Sketch
- Figma
- Invision
UI Engineering
I can build an architecturally accurate application environments that would be integration-ready using NodeJS, NPM, and Gulp, with JSON data.
- HTML5
- CSS | Sass | Less
- Visual Studio
- Sublime
- Bootstrap
- JQuery
- NodeJS
- Gulp | Grunt
Beauty with Purpose
Thorough discovery and UX research always deliver tested and bullet-proof timelines, user stories, wireframes, designs, and prototypes. Solutions that are scalable and will meet their client's needs.
SiteZeus
This design had its limitations. I was only allowed to change the CSS but not the HTML structure.
Tech Data
With the TechData Marketplace, I had a lot of fun training the on-staff designers to facilitate UX card sorting and task priority sessions.
Tech Data
The Hub was a challenging project as I had to interview users from all of their offices, including facilitating sessions in spanish for their offices in Mexico.
SiteZeus
This is a great example of demonstrating the differences between ideal state and MVP for reporting.
JoinHike
This workflow and detailed breakdown of persona permissions has been created over many online sessions with developers and product owner.
Advent Health
While at The Advent Health headquarters, I facilitated a week-long session that included full discovery, interpretation of the research, and high-fidelity mockups.
Outback Steakhouse & Carrabbas
While at Bloomin' Brands I helped create the Dine Rewards and Online Ordering user journeys.
Tech Data
This task priority chart was created during the Canadian user interviews for The Hub project.
Well Triggered!
Hey there I'm Mandy, the notification master. You clicked the trigger, and that triggered me to appear, so here I am.