Sr. UX Designer & Consultant

PROBLEM SPACE
         Pivotal is a multi-cities consultancy that spans 3 continents, North America, Europe, and Asia. I worked at 4 different locations when I was consulting there: Denver, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Boston. The projects I typically take on are enterprise projects, where myself, a team of engineers and PM would co-locate with our client's team, typically a product scrum team from a large enterprise . We help our Enterprise client to design and develop custom software to solve for their specific problem space. My role is to help with research, design, and also train my designer pair tp level up with the skills that goes into designing a product. 

Double Diamond

Process

        Pivotal Labs, the consultancy arm of Pivotal, has a very specific process when it comes to product development. That's why our client hired us to help them, not only build a product, but also teaches their team to adopt this methodology. We work in balance team of Product Manager, Designer, and Engineers. We pair with a client in similar role. In the discovery phase we research the problem space. In the framing phase we narrow down the problem we want to solve and we do it in small iterative deliverables. We testing our design and code continuously, allow us to make improvement and recover fast if we find bugs or need to pivot.

Research and Synthesis

• We identify users
• Go out and interview them in their environment

• Sorting through notes taken at each of the session
• Typically a pattern of pain points or insights will emerge about the problem space
• The balanced team can make decisions on the problem and action for next steps

Working as a team

         Sometime deconstructing a problem can be tough, we need perspective from business stakeholders, system engineers, designers, and PM all in the room. We typically map out complex systems in a user journey to understand how our user interact with the product eco-system in different phases. This exercise help give us context to when each system comes into play in the front end as well as back end. It also shows us where the on the journey the user is experiencing difficulty or delight with our products. 

The result is typically a modern interface with streamline functionality and mobile responsive to replace our client's legacy product

Added Complexity

       Building an entire mortgage banking application was already a huge undertaking in itself, but our client was a large corporation that services many different entities. They also want to use the application we have built for them as a white label product to be re-skinned and used for many other entities. I have take those consideration in when designing functionality for one site to make sure that it's universal when it's sold to another brand. All in all projects like this is a huge exercise of UX and UI undertaking that have taught me a lot about an industry that I previously did not have any experience in. That's the challenge of being a consultant and also the unique skillsets that you have to develop. Working with Pivotal, I traveled across the North America to work with many industries and flex different skill-set as a designer. With some clients it was not about the UI, but more about teaching and enabling their team, with others, it's a huge UI deliverable. In both scenarios, I try to champion the users, getting best Product development methodologies to test work flow and to try to reach our users for interviews. I also learn to work in diverse teams and with many different designers on a project. With this experience under my belt, I'm confident I can jump into any team and become a valuable asset.