SUMMARY:

• Senior User Experience Consultant / UX Manager / Information Architect / UI Designer / Usability Expert / Web Strategist with 18 years of experience in the web software development field. Specializing in UX improvements, prototyping, content organization, navigation, strategy, user research, visualizing ideas and helping clients to improve user experience through thoughtful design.
• Industry specific experience - software development, startup, medical, government, non-profit, banking, insurance, publishing, financial, entertainment, education, eCommerce.
• Years in UX/UI Design and User Research

• Ability to deliver high-end applications from the initial concept through to the final product delivery.
• Expertise in strategy and vision development gained in various industries.
• Experienced with all web project phases and cycle (research & analysis, planning, design, documentation, presentation, implementation, testing, maintenance, support and training).
• A problem-solver with the ability to align team goals to larger organizational objectives, while promoting web best practices and usability standards.
• Can lead and coordinate cross-functional teams and overall stakeholder engagement process - gathering and analyzing end-users’ & internal stakeholders’ requirements, then presenting findings & recommendations back to the project team and senior management.
• Can lead and conduct usability testing and end-user research - developing test scenarios & questionnaires, selecting participants, consolidating feedback, validating designs through usability testing, interpreting research data and making recommendations based on the test results.
• Experienced UI Designer in (responsive) web and mobile.
• Knowledgeable in user-centered design (UCD) process, user profiles / personas creation, gap analysis, competitive market research, analyzing site metrics, prototyping, IA, Navigation, Interaction Design, creating detailed site maps and storyboards, proposing web solutions & communicating vision to stakeholders.
• Good understanding of content creation, organization and management, CMS Implementation & best practices: workflows, taxonomies, content classification (content types, metadata etc.), dashboards creation and data visualizations.
• Experience with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media and Web Marketing.
• Aware of the latest web trends and technologies.
• Extensive UX consulting experience working with clients and agencies, collaborating with designers, content contributors, technical leads, project managers, sales and marketing people. Was involved in some capacity in over hundred web design and (re)design projects (from very small to large content-heavy sites).
• Managed about forty of them.

EXPERTISE TOOLS:

UX Strategy, Vision & Roadmap, Presentations to different stakeholders

UX/UI Design (User Flows, Scenarios, Personas, Wireframes, UID Specs)

Conceptual Design (Sketching, Brainstorming)

IA (Sitemaps, Navigation Design, Content Inventory & Content Organization)

Prototyping tools - Axure, Moqups, Sketch

Diagramming/Sketching tools - Visio, Edraw, Lucidchart, Mindmap

To create production-ready files - Photoshop, Zeplin, Figma

Analytics tools - Google Analytics & Google Webmaster Tools, WebTrends, Adobe Experience Cloud

User Research & Usability Testing For Usability Testing - Camtasia & Morae

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:

UX Manager

Confidential

Responsibilities:

• Play a central role in the re-design of the current Confidential marketplace and the crafting community.
• Involved in staffing decisions and project planning.
• Responsible for the product vision, quality, creativity and final delivery of the product.
• Managing a team of designers, business analysts and content writers.

UX Consultant

Confidential

Responsibilities:

• Designed broker's and underwriter's journeys for the insurance application for a new Confidential company, created wireframes in Moqups and presented new designs at client meetings daily, collaborated with other designers, as well as the development team, reviewed design implementation.

UX Consultant

Confidential

Responsibilities:

• Worked on a mobile app design for Confidential Financial Advisors, building financial dashboards and data visualizations in Axure, interfacing with the client and the development team and writing up UI requirements for developers.

UX Consultant

Confidential

Responsibilities:

• Leading UX work on three projects - doing wireframes (including mobile and responsive), flow diagrams, requirements gathering and providing my recommendations for improving overall user experience.

Manager, Experience Design

Confidential

Responsibilities:

• Conducting usability testing with another researcher on OPC (internal admin system) and presenting our recommendations for improvements.
• Creating UI prototypes for a scanner display panel & conducting A/B testing at different branches to validate new designs.

Sr. User Experience Lead

Confidential

Responsibilities:

• Analyzed web stats, conducted competitive research and provided my recommendations.
• Presented my recommendations to the strategy team and product groups
• Collected end-user and business requirements and created high Confidential wireframes, and other UX artifacts as part of the project work.
• Collaborated with the strategy, editorial and development teams on regular basis.

User Experience Architect

Confidential

Responsibilities:

• Created visual UI mock-ups, paper and digital HTML prototypes, story boards, style guides, and user interface specifications, by applying research, design standards, industry best practices, UCD and taking into account strategic business objectives, user needs and systems constraints.
• Was responsible for identifying target audiences for toronto.ca; assessing user characteristics, requirements, needs and satisfaction levels.
• Created Personas for Confidential ’s website and for various site sections that reflected user needs, wants, and motivations, and helped us to identify new opportunities for improving Confidential ’s website.
• Designed new site navigation (IA & Site Maps) with well defined navigation flow and provided requirements for Meta Data, faceted navigation & search, internal linking structure and page optimization to ensure that site’s content is navigable and found by internal and external search engines.
• Designed standardized page templates with re-usable components (portlets) for landing pages, macro-sites, Divisional Profiles, search results and detailed content pages.
• As the User Experience Specialist assisted Strategic Communications and the Web Competency Centre in bringing current toronto.ca static site content into a new website design using the Confidential ‘s web content management platform.
• Examples: good use of images that don‘t clutter the page, but illustrate the purpose of the page, use of alt tags on images, keyword-rich page titles, accessible copy written in plain language and at the appropriate reading level, alternative means of providing the same information for seeing or hearing impaired users - closed captioning options on videos for hearing impaired users and voice descriptive options for visually impaired users etc.
• Was also creating and testing user interface designs, prototypes and specifications across multiple platforms and browsers, analyzing and interpreting the results of these tests, and making recommendations to improve design and functionality.
• Was responsible for creating usability guidelines to assist Strategic Communications group with content migration process.
• Was creating, promoting and supporting a corporate standard for accessibility and usability excellence.
• As part of the user engagement, conducted a series of user interviews, usability testing sessions at various stages of the development process, to better understand user behaviors and preferences on Confidential ’s website.
• Lead internal stakeholder interview sessions to help them identify strategic goals and objectives, business requirements and future improvements, site’s focus, top tasks and core content.
• Have done extensive usability and best practices review of the current site, conducted data gathering activities, consolidated feedback and prepared evidence-based reports and recommendations
• Created numerous documents, outlining technical and functional specifications, as well as standards and guidelines for Confidential ’s website.

Confidential

User Interface Designer & Technical Liaison

Responsibilities:

• Brought passion and enthusiasm to the team, while advocating for the consumer
• Promoted cross-functional team participation and involvement through effective communication and joint decision-making
• Was overseeing user engagement and testing, user interface designs, prototypes, and specifications, content preparation for migrating content into custom-built content management system.
• Acquired, analyzed, and prioritized the feature lists derived from the target customer requirements, end user requirements, and the corporate direction.
• Developed Vision documents, UI and usability standards and guidelines.
• Analyzed diverse user, customer, and business needs
• Gathered, analyzed and translated business requirements into functional specifications
• Collaborated with various teams including marketing, editorial, and development to evolve wireframes and mockups into final page designs
• Defined usability requirements in collaboration with end-user groups
• Coordinated the weekly tasks for the development team, as they relate to business priorities
• Assigned resources
• Participated in the interviewing process
• Managed user expectations among business owners and system users.
• Participated in the whole system development life cycle from inception to testing to ensure quality and proper implementation of requirements
• Built project plans and participated in the scoping and estimation of proposed projects
• Ensured project deliverables are implemented within time, budget and quality parameters
• Facilitated the release planning process together with the business partner
• Monitored website traffic and visitor interactions, analyzed and reported findings
• Supported usability testing activities, conducted contextual enquiries
• Provided formal and informal end user training