While at Blue Egg, I managed the design execution of this online magazine dedicated to sustainable (green) living. This site was driven by a content management system (Interwoven TeamSite). I collaborated continuously with the Editor-in-Chief, Product Manager, and Director of Product Development to ensure on-time delivery of this site under extraordinarily tight deadlines (concept-deployment = 5.5 months).

• Responsible for defining a page and site structure that could be developed and deployed via Interwoven TeamSite within 2 months
• Acted as liaison between designers and developers to ensure that proposed visual design could be successfully executed with existing technology infrastructure.
• Educated editorial staff on structuring content for consumption by CMS.
• Mediated issues between development and editorial teams to identify solutions.
• Ensured all QA for front-end design and functionality

(now offline)

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Artifacts

Wireframes for visual design and front-end technology (.pdf) >

Wireframes for CMS templates (.xls) >

Screenshots of final site design (.pdf) >

Along with Product Manager, led the product strategy for the re-launch of Blue Egg’s anchor site, Green Building Blocks. As part of this relaunch, was directly responsible for:

• identifying innovation opportunities through competitive analysis, primary user research, and market research
• facilitating, synthesizing, and analyzing results of primary user research
• defining the key users (personas)
• articulating major use cases
• designing all information architecture
• defining editorial requirements
• defining visual design requirements
• directing visual design team
• collaborating on marketing requirements
• creating functional requirements
• creating interface requirements for the content management system
• directing front-end development team to uphold visual design styles
• ensuring all QA for front-end design and functionality
• ensuring all QA for CMS templates.

(now offline)

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Artifacts (.pdf downloads)

Screenshot of home page >

User research summary >

Functional specification >

Screenshots of the Listing Wizard, an application for green builders to create online profiles (built in FLEX) >

My team at Razorfish was engaged to help TIAA-CREF develop and implement an online strategy that would preserve and grow their existing customer base. At the time of this engagement, TIAA-CREF had an 80+ year history of serving those employed by not-for-profit organizations. For most of that history, they had essentially no competition for their market. However, consumer-oriented investment companies like Fidelity and Vanguard had begun to make inroads into TIAA-CREF’s market.

This engagement spawned 7 separate projects. I led the experience design for them all. My role extended from the early strategy phases through every phase of conceptualization, design and delivery to the development team.

I managed multiple simultaneous user experience teams, working to maintain an integrated, consistent approach across all projects. I contributed to this expanding relationship by identifying additional projects that were logical for us to wrap into our design strategy.

This account grew to be the largest revenue-generating account at Razorfish at the time, bringing in $7 million in 2005.

September 2004 – March 2006

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Artifacts

“Before” screenshots: page 1 | page 2 | page 3

Prototype

Personas (pdf)

Montage to introduce personas to client’s team

]]> http://juliecasanave.com/tiaa-cref/feed/ 0 http://juliecasanave.com/bell-south/ http://juliecasanave.com/bell-south/#comments Sat, 14 Feb 2009 21:25:48 +0000 http://juliecasanave.com/wordpress/?p=107

BellSouth knew that high numbers of people were abandoning their website in the midst of ordering or modifying their telephone service. They faced a tedious, confusing, and restrictive process at www.bellsouth.com. The goal of this project, undertaken by my team at Razorfish, was to evaluate the problems and then completely overhaul the ordering experience to deliver a world-class solution.

I planned and managed the usability sessions that formed the basis for this project. My analysis of the findings resulted in our winning the contract to do the design work.

The most prominent insight from the testing was that people abandoned the site due to a lack of ways to research products, services, and pricing before committing to an order. After being awarded the design work, I worked on a team to conceive of, propose, and design a new model for the ordering process. This model transformed the process from a loose, unrelated, and restrictive collection of sequential steps into a non-linear browsing/shopping model, combined with an order completion module.

While the interaction design in and of itself was a stimulating challenge, an equally challenging aspect of this project was the process of advocating this model to the client, educating them over a period of several weeks in order to get their buy-in and full support for all that the new model implied (in terms of operational and technical changes).

Activities

Developed flow diagrams; conducted paper prototyping; conducted functional prototyping. Dramatically reduced review cycles through use of clickable schematics, produced in Excel.

September 2003 – December 2003 (Usability test sessions)

May 2004 – August 2004 (Site re-design)

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Artifacts

Clickable Schematics (zip file, 111k)

Screenshots: Before |Â After

The Caribbean island of Curacao is not a well-known North American tourist destination. It’s far away, hard to pronounce, and relatively obscure by comparison with better known islands. Curacao’s tourist board, the CTB, hired my team at Razorfish to develop a web site strategy that would help sell Curacao’s unique characteristics as an authentic, European-flavored Caribbean destination. Their main objective was to attract more North American visitors.

I led the user experience team in conducting interviews, both with people who have visited Curacao, and with people in the tourist industry on the island. Happily for us, those two weeks of interviews took place on the island itself, in mid-November.

During the course of our research, we discovered what it is that makes Curacao unique: its authenticity, its history, and its ties to Europe. Nowhere else in the Caribbean do you get all the usual Caribbean sun & fun PLUS Dutch architecture & history. When you visit Curacao, you’re visiting a self-contained and self-sustained place where real people live and work. You’re not herded off to the “tourist section” of the island.

Out of the research, I developed a cast of personas that represented the types of people the tourist board would want to reach with the site. Based on these personas, I guided the development of the CTB’s strategic roadmap. They helped define which features and functions should be included in which releases.

As a result of our strategy work, Razorfish was hired to continue on to design, build, and implement a complete overhaul to www.curacao.com.

October 2004 – December 2004

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Artifacts

Strategic Roadmap (excerpt) PDF, 436k

Customer lifecycle PDF, 126 k

Scope map PDF, 50k

Functionality matrix PDF, 24k