Modular and scalable web product for highly regulated government job boards

The Project

Monster.com needed a new product for highly regulated governnent job boards. The existing products were custom and not scalable. I was brought on as lead designer to work with in-house and overseas dev teams. The goal was to build a "base product" that provided add-ons and easy branding updates to keep costs and personalization work low to provide a competitively priced "out of the box" option as well as an "add-on" model for more features and branding at a higher price point or subscription.

The Assessment

There had not been much discovery work, so I spearheaded a week of research with the business owners and analysts to collect data and competitve research in order to hone the direction and personas. We also interviewed several salespeople and subject matter experts in the state-required job board industry. The resulting documentation and empathy for the primary and secondary users was referred to daily and drove key decisions during the life of the product. The base design was built from a style guide/design system that was not only WCAG compliant, it also utilized a relative color palatte that could be interchanged with ANY branding colors in minutes.

The Goal

Aside from business needing to offer a more flexibly priced, scalable product, the goals were to build an easily maintained, easily rebranded base product that could be "channelized" at scale. This international agile team was focused on getting a working prototype for sales, while simultaneously connecting the back end at closest pace with prototype. Part of this project was to code using the cleanest taxonomy possible in order to reduce maintenance on the base site all the "channels" would refer to for functionality and features. Channels were built for branding and personalization requirements for each state, including languages and government accessibility features. A "resume builder" feature designed to change and add fields and features according to state requirements.

The Results

The product included a complex yet simple to use case management system for states to manage content and custom homepage offerings. The product is now sold and managed thru the MonsterGov team and is extremely successful. Monster's ad page for this product.

Internal Content Management System user testing

The Project

The CMS for the editorial and sponsored content on dailybreak.com was unstable and needed to be on a new platform. The existing CMS had no UI design attention in years and was not maintained well, so it had become "a dumping ground" for erroneous fields and features that were no longer in use. The existing CMS was very difficult to use (and often did not work, requiring dev time for bugs) and onboarding new employees took at least a month of training. The project was to "clean up" the CMS UI and make as few changes to dailybreak.com's UI design as possible, so in the future—when we had a high-functioning CMS—we could redesign dailybreak.com.

The Assessment

The current CMS was extremely complicated and unfortunately the functionality was not documented. Only a few people knew how parts of the CMS were supposed to work versus how it did work. Even fewer understood the fields and functionality that existed, but were no longer in use. Everyone agreed the user experience was not good, but no one had tested it with users or assessed it in any detail.

The Goal

Aside from platform changes, the goals were ease-of-use and speed-to-task. We were looking to cut content-creation time significantly, and reduce onboarding time for new users. I lobbied for user testing, since we had about eight primary users and could establish metrics for success as well as easily hear from actual users. So we tested 4 "experienced" users and 5 "beginner" users from within the company and designed tests and questions that could be used to understand how users percieve the current CMS. All tests were designed intending to use similar tests to see if we had increased speed-to-task and reached all of our other goals for the new design. A basic assessment was presented and future success measurements would be weighed against all the testing results.

The Testing

UX was new to the team so we developed a script and strategy for our two primary personas. Our timeline was short and our budget was zero. In three weeks, we were able to design and write all the tests and met with over ten users. We created benchmarks and testing data that could drive our decisions and help the developers and stake holders understand more about the critical issues with the exisitng CMS. All of the design principles for the new CMS were driven by these tests and actual user experiences.

The Content

The current CMS had no documented requirements and only a few people knew how parts of the CMS were supposed to work. Testing showed none of the experienced users followed a similar workflow, and they all had made up their own work-arounds. Going through each section of content production was a painstaking effort, requiring communication with all of the departments to assess need and functionality on dailybreak.com and balancing that with the goals and usability of the new CMS. Nearly all of the requirements had to be written during the design phase. This is a sample of some of the original CMS UI.

The Results

The information architecture was redesigned, a feedback system was created (there were only confusing field validations in current CMS and all users were confused in testing), and the information design had to be completely overhauled. Users wanted to feel they understood where they were in the process, so all the interactions had to inform them on success or error in a clear way, and content validation had to be a simple and effective process. This is a sample of the basic template redesign for the new CMS.

Point of Sale UI new design

The project

Creating a new site for customers AND employees for personal lines accounts at an insurance agency is as high-profile as it gets. Establishing the most basic interaction levels was a helpful place to start and get developers onboard with major changes in a new work flow. With four main templates and a lot of functionality, it was helpful to create a simple UI model to keep the changes in the project on track. Creating a UX analysis that relied heavily on imagery to support findings was effective and the team was able to comprehend and refer to the model quickly.

Hanover consumer site redesign

The Project

A few things were happening. IT needed to get off of the existing hanover.com platform and marketing had just rebranded. The existing content on hanover.com was from another era with an entirely different strategy. Time and resources had us ‘refinishing’ a few things and ‘phase 2-ing’ a few more, but we pretty much flipped the whole site from the studs.

The Assessment

Competitive research, google analytics, usability, site map, current content, SEO strategy, user profiles, marketing strategy alignment—the site was hitting very few of these marks well. We visited agents to discuss this site (and a few other hanover sites) to get some real data to take back to stakeholders. The existing site was also a mountain of redirects and quick fixes from previous incarnations, so we also had to make sure we didnt completely break it.

The Goal

SEO was a big driver, and building a basic brand design and web style guide that we could begin using on all of our sites would be a huge step toward consistency. We needed to get this site to make sense for a customer who we considered our primary user (not an agent or an investor) but we it had to work for everybody. We also need to pull in our budding social media content and add new features like being mobile-friendly.

The Content

Working with a small team of copywriters, we identified keywords and taxonomy to increase our google results. Titles, H1 & H2, alt tags, cross-linking strategies, xml sitemaps, we even threw in some metadata for good luck. After that, we needed to focus the content on the customer, not the agents as in the previous site. That was hard to get buy-in from all of the business departments, but we managed to move the needle quite far.

The Results

The launch went smoothly, a few redirects and everybody was happy. The feedback was great and so far the traffic seems better. Internally it was a great success and we use this site as a very basic UI and style launchpad for all future hanover sites.

Risk Solutions consumer site redesign

The Project

The existing “Loss-Control” site was simply neglected for too long. It was hosted by a vendor and had become tough to update. Working with the vendor, dedicated copywriters and the risk solutions department, we reworked the whole site—which also became the guinea pig for the hanover.com redesign (the new risk solutions site had to retrofit into hanover.com which was launched many months after this site...looks like that still needs to happen).

The Assessment

The site was pretty confusing to navigate and had outdated content that was almost a liability to have online. A huge part of assessing this site was sorting through its existing content and figuring out how we wanted to reorganize it and what that meant for the new site’s architecture. A lot of discussions with the primary users helped us develop some organizational strategy and big changes in business and marketing strategies drove this site’s new priorities.

The Strategy

We wanted this to be mobile-friendly and also be a part of our overall SEO strategy because the content on this site was going to be well suited for social media. We needed to stress the importance of maintenance for this site and pushed for a content strategy that included an editorial calendar and some alignment with social media.

The Content

The timeline was very aggressive for this site, so keeping everyone to the schedule was a big deal. Fortunately, I did not have the job of reworking all of the copy and building an editorial calendar, but for the SEO goals, basic layout of the pages and new IA, our copywriters did a great job writing to the new page templates set for this site. We also needed to come up with some more user-friendly terminology that could work for an agent and a consumer.

The Results

The site was very well recieved and its traffic increased (I haven’t checked in a while, but I would safely wager it has increased quite a bit). The primary users (and the editors) of this site are very happy with all the changes and its content is being steadily updated thanks to the new editorial calendar.

Rating site front-end design

The Project

Due to losses and vulnerabilities of the current system, a new site needed to be built so that users did not have to rely on several access data bases and manual processes that were cumbersome and ineffective.

The Assessment

The site was completely set up when I was approached to consult (as seen in the image above). Several developers and tech leads had set up the new tech/data approach. While most of the data issues had been solved, the interface they had constructed had a lot of dead ends and redundancies, and it was pretty far off-brand.

The Strategy

This had a tough timeline and I had to really focus on ‘the low-hanging fruit’ because there were not a lot of resources. After understanding the purpose and scope of the project, I focused on the groups using the site and what other sites and applications they would be using with it. It was these conversations that helped the project and tech leaders understand what they weren’t seeing. The example above shows how there were two pages to get through before finding what you needed—a policy or quote number search result.

The Content

After all of the talks about what exactly the user was looking for and where they were looking for it, we were able to eliminate the first page altogether and land them on a ‘homepage search’ which was basically a single field for a policy or quote number. We had several roles to consider on this page, so we offered an advanced search as well that could filter search results and also added more specific fields for specialized users. We also introduced a navigation bar so that this page could always be accessed and also so future pages could be introduced. On the rest of the pages we discovered a need for printing the results or exporting to excel—even comparing some results to easily see differences.

The Results

The site improvements were notable to the test users and we were able to integrate ANOTHER project into this one seamlessly because of the redesigned architecture and ease-of-use (and maintenance). Ultimately, we were able to enhance all the great back-end changes with some front-end usability, and the test users were able to understand the new site much better. The image below shows the new ‘search landing page’ and a few more before and after pages for this project.

Rating site new design

The Project

This project was an off-shoot of the previous rating project. I was brought on to help the project leader realize his vision of this new product. The main purpose of the site is creating/updating worksheets for insurance raters and safely saving and storing data that has been updated.

The Assessment

There was a small, very specialized group of users for this site. They were used to complexity and layers of processes that eventually created problems with manual errors and it was a nightmare to train new users. We had to simplify a very complicated process and we had to keep an eye on training.

The Strategy

To be honest, it took me more than one meeting before I could even figure out what was supposed to happen! Between the enormous changes to the current process and the incredibly elaborate 'insurancy' operations that had to happen, it was hard to visualize the goal. It was just one of those fun brain-teasing projects you could really dive into and it turned out better than anyone had imagined because we had a smart team of developers, data architects, tech leads and test users who all worked together to shape the site and build out some great features.

The Content

This site is all about updating and managing data in a seamless way, while applying a lot of checks and balances in the background. With all the database communication happening behind the scenes, we had to make sure we wouldnt hang up the site with processing or deliver inaccurate data while we were setting up our front-end designs. We always had to consider how we messaged and user expectations for each process.

The Results

The test users love it and despite its complex nature, we got it to a place I think I could understand in one meeting! It was such a fun project to work on because everybody from very different parts of IT brought their game and worked as an ensemble. As a bonus of getting all the cross-functional teams at the same table, I think it also expanded the team’s understanding and appreciation about their co-workers’ roles and the valuable work they do.

Design and styling for IT site rework

The Project

This was a small offshoot of a prior project. We were able to add a new search field on the home page of an agent site, and we were also trying to introduce a better account view to the search results.

The Assessment

The site we were working with was very old and full of constraints. We had major limitations when it came to our options. We had to get resourceful.

The Strategy

This was a quick and dirty project so we did the best with what we had—changing the colors and some styling was a relatively easy way to create a positive impact, and keeping it simple and functional was a good bet.

The Content

There were a lot of extra links and sidebars and marketing content that had very little to do with a search landing page, so we were able to pare that down to almost nothing which really helped focus the primary content on this page.

The Results

The whole search section of the site (and all of the links out of it) suddenly matched the look and feel of the rest of the site AND it was less cluttered and easier to use!