After more than 20 years doing career coaching and recruiting for a larger firm, Ed Rogan decided to set out on his own. I worked with Ed to get an understanding of how he wanted to present himself to his potential clients, the types of content he would be creating, developed the base copy, and then built a site for him in WordPress. The site deliverable included instructional documentation on how he could add, edit, and delete listings and notes of congratulations to all of his new hires.
UX Writing
This small nonprofit organization has an important mission: it helps published authors experiencing medical emergencies to get through their financial difficulties. I worked with the board of directors to design both a front-end site for people to learn about the organization and set up the visual structure for a password-protected administrative section on the back end. This system allows for the authors to securely request funding online and for the board to discuss each case and have it documented in the request. I worked with an outside developer to build the site using the Drupal platform.
For more than three years I have been sharing my knowledge with others by teaching workshops for General Assembly, an adult education organization that teaches people how to break into the tech world. I have done courses on business writing called “Stop Writing Crap!” as well as introductions to Adobe InDesign and WordPress that have resulted in return visitors and even new clients!
As Co-founder of this startup in virtual reality and education, the journey of this organization was far more than building a user experience architecture or developing a content strategy for a client. I took part in every decision made to move us forward as we developed this market-making company.
Goals
To envision and build an education technology studio-lab where students would create and share immersive stories and games from inside a Virtual World by means of motion capture technologies and 3D tracking systems.
Process
Working with my co-founder to implement the vision, we acquired both human and financial resources to allow us to build a platform and hold workshops with students to test our assumptions and our methodology, get feedback, then iterate on what we learned.
Challenges
Finances were our biggest challenge—and ultimately the catalyst for our demise. We were self-funded for most of the life of the company, though we did successfully complete a Kickstarter campaign to help us develop some of our story-games based on workshops that our student groups completed.
Results
While we made the difficult decision to wind down operations in late 2018, we received accolades from other virtual reality companies for our innovation and had a working prototype that we made available as an open-source virtual reality world.
RealityNext\’s International Cloud Learning Sessions
RealityNext\’s Story-Game making workshops with middle and high school students
Check out one of our completed curricula. This one was based on Newton\’s First Law of Physics.
The evolution of the T-Mobile user interface
Goals
- Create workflow to ease process of switching to T-Mobile.
- Focus on sales conversions based on call center interactions over online shopping cart.
Process
- Learned about user base in project: Customer service call center agents, call service managers, and prospective customers.
- Worked through use cases of on- and off-hours scenarios.
- Whiteboarded iterations of solutions, then built high-fidelity wireframes to pass on to development team.
Challenges
- Fulfilling use cases of on-hours and off-hours call scenarios.
- Making decisions as to how potential customers can interact via phone and online.
- Not all scenarios had been thought through by client, meaning that some UX solutions had to be discarded until the technology caught up.
Solution
- Campaign validated client assumptions that inbound calling works as viable solution.
- Set a UX basis for future campaigns utilizing callbacks.
Built through joint collaboration of Garrigan Lyman Group and T-Mobile. I served as UX architect. This UX copy deck shows the workflow and script that customer service agents would use for one aspect of the customer journey.
Goals
- Create a user experience for corporate and store employees to enter information into a portal that gives them credit for taking wellness steps.
- Design for mobile first.
- Facilitate ease of use for human resources staff to create updates and send announcements with minimal technical fuss.
Process
- Used existing research to understand employee needs.
- Iteratively worked with client to ensure that needs for documentation uploads or scans could be met through phone use.
- Ensured clarity of status of all documentation uploads for employee and dependents.
Challenges
- Content management system did not always work as expected.
- Ensuring that requirements for U.S. and Canada sites were in sync.
- Security and privacy in overall public-facing messaging and UX based on previous hacking attempts.
- Change in requirements mid-way through project.
Solution
- Site worked as needed to ensure that employees comply with HR needs and receive rewards for submitting activity.
- Mobile-first design alleviated potential desktop challenges.
I built the UX architecture as a consultant for the Garrigan Lyman Group.
Goals
To relaunch the client’s site and their branding with a new focus on targeting management and decision-makers on this sales-enablement process
Process
Starting with a content audit, we worked on categorizing content based on usefulness and the company’s refocused mission. Eventually a pattern emerged that showed a way to clearly delineate the information architecture. From there the pieces began to fall into place.
Challenges
- The sheer amount of existing content that needed to be audited and either removed, updated or repurposed presented challenges in how the client wanted to present themselves
- Making the product and program names more understandable to first-time visitors
- Letting go of some expensively produced content that no longer fit the business model
Results
The relaunch resulted in a beautiful, engaging site, with an ease of use where visitors could choose programs, useful content, or products to purchase based upon their needs, all with an eye on lead generation at the end of the journey.
This project was done as a contractor for the Garrigan Lyman Group.
How does one turn more than 12 years of work into a single page of a portfolio? As a journalist and leader of an award-winning community media company, I wrote hundreds of news articles, informational pieces, and strategic documents. As CEO of this organization, I oversaw multiple publications and products that informed, educated and excited thousands of readers while overseeing success of the business. Here’s a nutshell of the work I did:
- I targeted overall voice and editorial strategy toward niche demographic.
- I led advertising and marketing initiatives that my team carried out.
- I collaborated with my executive board, journalists, designers, our sales team, and other stakeholders to deliver our publications week in and week out.
- I used analytics and audience feedback to continually assess and improve content quality.
- I served as the voice of the organization by meeting regularly with community leaders, audience, and company ownership.
- I established content marketing plans that generated increase in ad revenue and client satisfaction.
- I envisioned, developed and launched a niche news and information site for young adults that served as a community builder while garnering accolades for its innovation and creativity.
- I took pride in mentoring upcoming journalists as they launched their careers.
- I delivered our product on time, 100% of the time, in a fast-paced environment under tight deadlines.
Download articles as they appeared in print from Joel\’s tenure as Editor-in-Chief.
This slideshow gives an anatomy of how I transformed the web presence of the organization
Goals
- Build customer journey for company rebranding effort.
- Generate new leads for medical practice.
Process
- Assessed audience needs through provided user research and personas.
- Worked with account, design and development teams to understand budget and limitations in build.
- Built sitemap and information architecture through multiple iterations and client changes.
- Built wireframes that created new customer journey to pass onto design and development teams.
Challenges
- Distilling morass of content and design choices from previous site to consistent, simple flow.
- Simplification of user flow with multiple forks into single path.
- Limited number of templates desired by client could lead to design complexity.
- Multiple scope and content changes by client throughout process.
Solution
Beautiful new site led to uptick in lead generation and roadmap to future functionality.
Built through joint collaboration of Garrigan Lyman Group and T-Mobile. I served as UX architect
Goals
- Build online museum to house the Washington State Jewish Historical Society’s hundreds of stories and artifacts to make them publicly available.
- Understand audience.
- Establish content types.
- Find proper software applications to satisfy needs.
Process
- Validated existing assumptions through user research and potential audience survey (received 220 responses).
- Worked with stakeholders to assess society and audience needs, how those needs would benefit their audience, then constructed engagement strategy.
- Developed personas, information architecture, and user experience architecture.
Challenges
- Small budget.
- Tying together multiple web systems.
- Security and privacy.
Solution
- Transformative WordPress site changed how the Washington State Jewish Historical Society tells its stories and interacts with the public.
- Secondary museum-grade site with batch upload feature for housing digital artifacts.
I researched, designed and built site as a consultant for the Washington State Jewish Historical Society. You can download a version of the Content Strategy I created for sustaining the site here. In addition, as part of this project, I created fifty exhibit boards for the WSJHS\’s fundraising event with content that would eventually become a part of the museum. This is one of the many boards where I interviewed the subject and wrote the copy for the display.