2014-2017
Embedded in IT, these were the years for me to establish the foundations of UX, dive even deeper into front-end dev and get a handle on the power of collaborative design sprints.
The Foundation scrum team became my family at work. We worked hard together and we played hard together. We performed at such a high velocity, that after the project they broke us up and asked each member to bring that culture into the new assignments.
I remember Nick Mosher brining design sprints back from SXSW and after our first few runs, we were hooked. Most successful design sprint in my career was when the product owner, after seeing the results of user testing deciding that we shouldn’t do the project. 700+ hours saved for the company.
We had some late nights testing our Axure prototypes with our beloved doctors, but it was always time well spent. We knew that our work was empowering family physicians to deliver holistic care to Americans across the country.
Even with good intention, a shopping page often grows unweildy over time and too often, is business centric. When a shopping wizard was proposed by our product partner, we put it to the test against various other ideas coming out of a sprint. The Netflix category rows clearly stood out and became the launchpad for new ways of thinking about our products. End result post launch was a 40% increase in order and revenue in a year-over-year comparison.
We were developing custom AEM components to empower our web designers and authors to be able to deploy stronger content faster. White-boarding sessions with CSS classnames and .net variables was a regular occurrence, leading to prototypes in CodePen for validation.
The deeper I got into front-end, the more I realized how nuanced and essential the craft was to the experience. Google and Amazon lose millions per 300 milliseconds of page speed loading per day. Through performance budgeting and site audits, we were able to increase our page speed by 25% on primary shopping cart.