WORK EXAMPLE

trove_wordmark_white.png

Trove was a social news aggregation app on iOS, Android, and the web. I worked with a small team of mostly engineers over 18 months to conceive, build, and launch Trove.

It's representative of the work I most enjoy. Though my title was User Experience Principal, I was known as "the swiss army knife" of the team and tapped into 20+ years of product, UX, marketing and team-building experience. Anything I could jump in and help make better I did.

On its launch The New York Times called Trove "a treasure for news junkies." CNBC called Trove "a Pinterest board for news." USA Today, The Today Show, and PCWorld also gave positive reviews.

The Trove team and technology became part of SocialCode in December 2015.

 

How I Helped at Trove

THROUGHOUT MY TIME THERE

  • Leadership
    • Challenge: UX design thinking needed to be quickly infused through a largely engineering-based team
    • Strove to make everyone a UX expert
    • Helped rally team from junior to senior members and across functions to own UX
    • Pushed all members of team to directly interact with users
  • UX 
    • Challenge: lack of definition about who customer is, what they want, and what they need
    • Created a continual, comprehensive view of the State of the UX
    • Continually refined description and user needs and behaviors
    • Prioritized feedback and ideas from all sources in one place with solution recommendations
  • Product Management
    • Challenge: Head of Product and Lead Product Designer needed to focus on strategy and creativity alongside team management
    • Promoted an evolving set of product questions we needed answered
    • Created product recommendations based on observing users of competitor apps
    • Scoured public and private sources for everything we could learn about competitor strategy and growth

DEVELOPMENT AND BETA

One of four market segments we identified.

  • Leadership
    • Challenge: Product name was uninspired and different than team's name
    • Researched brand name change across multiple practical and market factors
    • Persuaded management to change product and team name to Trove
  • UX Research
    • Challenge: Team needed to iterate very fast with limited budget but wanted great UX
    • Performed weekly UX tests with new and current users
    • Made test videos, analysis, and recommendations available to full team in hours
    • Democratized UX ownership encouraging full team to pose questions for users
  • UX Design
    • Challenge: With so much UI work to produce, design team needed help
    • Provided specific design solutions for designers to explore
    • Produced UI ideas for onboarding, search results, user profiles in Photoshop, Illustrator
  • Marketing
    • Challenge: Team lacked a dedicated marketing role, plus time and budget limited
    • Developed a segmentation based on analysis of news and social media use data and user interviews
    • Led project to create logo and wordmark, hiring designer and managing process
    • Led project to sharply state product positioning and unique brand personality
    • Challenge: with no established brand values the voice, personality, and purpose of Trove was ambiguous
    • Led project to establish brand voice across marketing and UX
    • Created personas for the market segments and for the brand
    • Challenge: wanted to launch with significant social media reach
    • Helped small team build 113K followers on Twitter, 640K on Facebook, using brand management and UX experience

PRE-LAUNCH

Analysis of related first experiences on iOS.

  • Leadership
    • Challenge: With new product and team name during the stress of final projects, need to rally team around the newly-defined customers and each other
    • Designed posters to make personas present in the office
    • Designed admittedly goofy posters to promote UX differentiators
  • Product Management
    • Challenge: Nearing launch with so much going on, focus on the simple fact we are about to introduce ourselves to the world can be a challenge 
    • Encouraged and helped CEO and Head of Product  to write write press release three months before launch. A good way to clarify vision, positioning and guide team.
  • UX
    • Challenge: Design and Product teams need information as fast as possible to make final UX calls and produce images for internal and external needs
    • Provided constant UX testing, analysis and recommendations while helping produce graphics
  • Marketing
    • Challenge: With launch imminent several major marketing initiatives need to be conceived, produced, and approved quickly
      • Selected and engaged a video production company and helped write and produce two launch videos in three weeks
      • Coordinated launch strategy with newly-hired PR firm and helped write briefing guides
      • Helped create concepts and copy for ads
  • Business Development
    • Challenge: Team needs to secure as many top-name publishers as possible for hosted content
    • Helped out with presentations pitching Trove partnerships around the country
  • Legal
    • Challenge: short on time and resources, we need to have user-friendly Terms of Service and our Privacy Policy locked-in
    • Became the primary editor and project manager for these two crucial documents

LAUNCH

  • Product
    • Challenge: launch always reveals unforeseen challenges and opportunities. Processing all that can be overwhelming
    • Took in and analyzed all new feedback and made product/UX recommendations
  • Community Development
    • Challenge: Trove curators are fuel to growth. Celebrity curators especially. We need as many as possible.
    • Helped pitch celebrity curators
    • Challenge: We want communities to know the Trove team and contribute our knowledge
    • Spoke at Design Thinking DC about fast and light ways to get started doing UX research
    • Mentored at Stanford Graduate School of Business's Media Entrepreneurship course, pairing tech with journalism
  • Customer Support
    • Challenge: Team needed a dedicated contact for a flood of new users
    • Designed all Help section content
    • Answered all support contact, including getting on phone with users

FILES AVAILABLE BY REQUEST

We had two launch videos: one a 60 second straight demo and this more playful one.

Quick pen and Sketch-generated ideas for profile screens.

  • Final Annual Performance Review
    • In-depth discussion of my final year in my last corporate position
  • Trove: The Brand
    • Segmentation, personas, brand, positioning
  • Consumer Trends Report
    • What's Going on Across Tech, Entertainment, Lifestyle, The Economy, etc.
  • App UX Questions Before Launch
    • Ranked-Order Questions We Need Answered
  • UX Analysis and Recommendations
    • What's Working and What Needs to Be Improved
  • Competitive Analysis of Flipboard
    • Analysis of A Competitor App's UX
  • Competitive Analysis of Onboarding
    • Screen-By-Screen and Side-By-Side