Turning complex problems into simple,
intuitive, and beautiful designs.
I am a product leader specializing in delivering exceptional digital experiences,
and increasing retention and engagement,
based on targeted researchand a user-centric approach.
Start by Defining the Problem Statement
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 Process View Samples
Experience 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.
View My Pymetrics ProfileA pymetrics profile describes an employee's cognitive and emotional results and how they compare to the general population.
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.
Identify
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.
Skills & Deliverables
- Cross-Functional Team Leadership
- User Interviews
- Target Audience Analysis
- Content Strategy
- Business & Data Analysis
- Task Priority & Storyboards
- User Journeys & Workflows
- Personas & User Stories
- Navigation & Architecture
- User-Centric Design Principles
- A/B & Usability Testing
- Agile Methodologies
- Wireframes & Prototypes
- High Fidelity Mock-Ups
- Style Guides & Design Systems
- Brand Strategy
- Responsive Design
- HTML & CSS/SCSS Library
- Accessibility & Compliance
Education and Certifications
Visual Communications
International Academy of Design and Technology
December 2007 to May 2012
Six Sigma Green Belt Certification
The New York Times Company - Training Program
April 2011
PMP 1 Certification Training Course
Cardinal Solutions - Agile Training Program
September 2015
A History of Designing User Experiences
I promote teamwork, excellent communication, evangelizes scalability/future-states, and empower the user to join the UX process and own their journey. Throughout my career, I have successfully launched end-end experiences for over 30+ projects. These involved a variety of industries that ranged from mobile apps, SaaS/PaaS products, B2B enterprise-level applications, and AI/Machine Learning platforms while leveraging Agile/Scrum methodology, SDLC, and Accessibility, and WCAG compliance.
What I am up to now...
Design Leadership Forum Member
InVision
January 2020 to Present - Membership
Digital Product UX & Mobile Manager
Capillus | Curallux Brands
December 2019 to Present - Contract Ending Soon
What I did then...
Director of Product Design & User Experience
SiteZeus
November 2017 to December 2019 - FullTime
I was charged with spearheading innovation, user experience, UI, and design QA efforts for our Synergy™ and Savvy™ Platforms. With the help of the support and development team, I built up the product team, collected and interpreted qualitative research data, interpreted 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 was 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.
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Principal User Experience Consultant & Team Mentor
Cardinal Solutions Group
June 2013 to December 2017 - FullTime
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.
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Sr. Mobile UX Designer
Mad Mobile
February 2012 to June 2013 - FullTime
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.
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Lead Sr. Interaction & UX Designer
The New York Times Company
August 2010 to February 2012 - FullTime
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.
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Recommendations
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
- Optimizely
- Google Analytics
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.
Download PDF Portfolio
Global Health Choices
Product Design of Telecase and Marketing Collateral
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.
Capillus
Nationally recognized hair growth company on a native mobile app for their product, repair workflows, adding gamification and UX pain points for reporting.
Orlando Magic
Example of the UX Research sessions I facilitate in order to gain insight into the organizational understanding of a user.
Amerijet
Facilitating a card sorting session to understand how the users mentally group content for the Amerijet.com website.
UXTeam Co
Created a custom 3D UX Design in Illustrator.
Well Triggered!
Hey there I'm Mandy, the notification master. You clicked the trigger, and that triggered me to appear, so here I am.