Generative research, MVP prototyping, end-to-end app design, and a design system overhaul
After I left WeWork, my partner and I moved to Paris, a lifelong dream for both of us. We weren't there for an extended vacation, so I still needed income, and freelance UX design felt like the right choice at the time. With the onset of COVID a few months later, the remote work and flexibility it provided were a boon.
What follows are a few deep-dives and a broader overview of the work I've done over the past few years. I can't publish examples of the work described below, but am able to show it in a 1:1 setting when appropriate.
Teal was the brainchild of Dave Fano (former Chief Product Officer of WeWork): a resource for "lifelong career benchmarking, to ensure that workers are maximizing advancement, earning potential, and happiness over their entire careers."
I started out part-time, mainly focused on early-stage opportunity identification, mainly around user interviews. As my time with the team expanded, I began to get deeper into the process. In total the scope of my work included all of the hits:
I worked with Teal on a dedicated basis for about seven months, right up until they closed their (successful) seed round. With funding in hand, Dave started to build out a full-time US-based team and my time with Teal came to a close.
In another more recent long-term consulting contract I worked with the design systems team at athenahealth, a Boston-based electronic healthcare company. athenahealth uses a self-built React-based design system called Forge to power its far-reaching billing, scheduling, and patient records software, but internal research had indicated that the design system had some serious flaws that were hurting trust and usage among designers and developers.
I was initially brought in to work alongside a full-time content writer updating all of the design system documentation; her institutional knowledge and coding background complemented my own design expertise and understanding of design systems. In this initial phase, I:
Once the content overhaul was done, I remained on for a few more months to help identify and address component issues in the Forge Figma library. This was a great hands-on experience and helped me appreciate the care and delicacy needed to maintain and update a working design system library.
My other consulting time was spent on projects big and small, including the following: