Below is a sample of projects I’ve worked on over the past few years. Most of my projects include research, strategy, and design, but some focus more heavily on one area.
Victoria’s Secret: Innovation Lab
After several years of focusing on the Product Page, I was asked to start a new team that would explore innovative ways to connect the site and stores, bridging the gap between the two main experiences customers had with the brand. This was pre-Covid, when innovative in-store experiences were a competitive space, and my goal was to find solutions that set us apart from everyone else. I started this work by focusing on store employees, who were the main connection to our customers.
Victoria’s Secret fitting rooms are one of the brand’s most popular experiences. It’s a vital touch point with the brand and highly personal, but since the experience is captured on paper, it’s also tedious for associates and lost when the customers leave the store. It also required a high level of expertise and mental load for employees who would like to spend more focus on the customer interaction.
Another researcher and I spent several months researching in-store experiences across a variety of brands and product types. We customized shoes, tried on clothing wired with measurement bands, and used digital fitting room mirrors. I also conducted a naturalistic observation study to better understand the decision-making considerations and mindsets of participants while in a store environment.
The initial findings led to the beginning of a new way of thinking about what tools the store employees had and we had started to create the wireframes for initial testing.
Victoria’s Secret, PINK, VS Sport: Site and brand evolution
For over three years I served as the UX Lead on the Product Detail Pages for Victoria's Secret, PINK and VS Sport. Collaborating with a fully agile product team, I participated in a site redesign and two roadmap creations and builds while also completing two-week sprints.
By focusing on one part of the customer’s journey, across three brands, I was able to ensure that the customer’s experiences and interactions were consistent and elevated while they were in the decision-making stage of their journey. My goal was to simplify while still maintaining brand and business needs.
The product page is a vital part of the experience and included complex size guides, reviews, images, product details, and recommendations. Each of these areas were evolving as technology and expectations changed in the retail space, but it all had to come together in a way that made the customer feel confident in their decision while also having a pleasant experience. To make sure the online experience was on par with the experience customers had in stores, I created several in-store studies. I also independently created a new home office training program that partnered with stores and made sure the people creating the experiences were also having them.
Morgan Stanley: Spending and Budgeting tool
This project was nominated for a 2022 Banking Tech award for Best Use of IT in Private Banking/Wealth Management.
Morgan Stanley wanted to end their dependence on a vendor experience that was lacking, so I was tasked with designing a comprehensive budgeting system that would live inside of the MS ecosystem.
Understanding the complexity was the first step. Not only could a user have multiple linked accounts, they could also have several levels of categories and preferences. They may want to see their activity in ranges of months or years. They may want summaries or details. I started by mapping out these complexities based on a list of MVP requirements we had agreed upon as both a business and product team.
One of the things we heard from our users was that creating a budget could be overwhelming. Many people we talked to had abandoned their budgeting apps and were using spreadsheets that they updated manually. With that in mind, I simplified the creation process as much as possible and used a friendly, supportive voice. Throughout the process, the question was: What is the smallest amount of information that we could give/receive and still ensure the user had confidence in the end result?
This had a 100% success rate in both completion and comprehension when tested with users.
Morgan Stanley: 401(k) Projections Research
While finance can lack excitement, it rarely lacks emotion. When it comes to planning for the future, people tend to experience stress, fear, and sometimes shame.
I conducted 1:1 interviews to understand if participants understood a new planning process but we learned a lot about how people approach the topic and were able to adapt the experience to be more gentle. Working collaboratively with the designer and business team, we were able to update our designs throughout the test and in the end, they had a strong launch and I was able to provide research results on three different designs of one experience, all within our timeline.
For this research, I recruited look-alike participants that represented three client segments. I had a diverse range of ages, genders, financial experiences, and education. One of the consistent themes that showed up immediately is that people have a lot of apprehension about planning for retirement. As I moved through the research we adapted the test to the feedback and ended up adding an information screen as well as softening some of the language and images participants saw.
Part of the test included a series of charts. We were also able to adapt the charts to the feedback and the design team ended up using a third iteration as their final design.
Morgan Stanley: Virtual Assistant
Chatbots are familiar and, from what I learned in this study, usually an unwelcome sight. As AI enters more companies and experiences, some people are ready to utilize new options while some still have some learned hesitation.
For this research, I had a diverse range of ages, genders, financial experiences, and education. I conducted 1:1 interviews and a card sort with questionairre. The goal was to better understand how people felt about chatbots, AI chatbots, and online help in general. One hypothesis was people would hate chatbots, but I found most people willing to interact with them. I learned that most people are multitasking when completing customer support tasks, and accessibility is important to a lot of people who might need more time or ways to process information both in the moment and in the future.
The product team used this information to assist with a workshop I co-hosted with stakeholders and now they are using the full set of information to build their one and five year roadmaps.
Victoria’s Secret: Know Your Customer internal training program
Most of my coworkers were involved with designing and building experiences but they hadn’t been in the stores, bought the products, or experienced the customer service the brand was known for. They were men, and we sold women’s lingerie.
My product team, who I worked closely with, was enthusiastic but lacked important context and experience. I talked to fellow designers who were having the same experience.
I had a good relationship with our local stores because I often conducted research in stores. I set up a monthly visit, before the store opened, where a shuttle of home office employees could spend one hour in the store. I assigned each course participant one of our five main customer personas and task to complete as that customer type. They had to complete the task online and then in-store. Each group was also taken to the fitting room and shown a demonstration of a personal fitting experience. When they returned to the home office, we had a debrief where the participants talked about what they learned and how they could apply that to their digital experiences.
The program ran successfully for several years and had a months-long waiting list. Several participants went through the program annually.