LRN

(01/2009 - 06/2010)
Senior Product Designer in charge of a risk assessment tool and a community for an ethics, compliance and environmental knowledge company. I lead the team through the transition from an acquired concept to a enterprise application. The position involved heavy collaboration with the business owners as well as on/offshore development teams.

All three products in LRN’s suit have an end user, customer admin and an internal admin element to them. Defining the personas and their usage pattern was critical in defining the posture of the tools and separating UI’s where appropriate. Gathering research was not a task that was budgeted for in most smaller projects, but I had to figure out how much casual needs gathering could be done. ‘Just because it is not budgeted, doesn’t mean its not expected’ is the odd reality in environments that don’t fully understand design.

Once the research had been gathered, it was compared to previous personas that were developed to see if it still mapped and either an individual persona was evolved or a new vague persona would be define. I find that a vague persona is better than nothing. Scenarios would then be developed to translate the business requirements and materialize them into a quick prototype. The Axure based prototype would help us, design and business, collaborate to clearly define the framework for the new features or overhauls. Many of LRN products were developed very quickly, without proper design the first time around. Once customers demonstrated interest AND frustration with it’s usability, then the business would commit to funding design for it. A bit backwards, but a reality in too many companies.

Once the framework was signed off, then the form and behavior spec was developed with collaboration from development. I find that earlier collaboration with dev helps the team moral as well as produce a realistic spec. Once development starts, my role reduce only about 25% as many details had to be communicated and tuned through the majority of the process. Once dev support dies down it’s time to communicate the design to QA.