Inkbrook Design: The Portfolio of Mackenzie Cameron
Resume | Portfolio | About Me |
Brazen had a problem. At the start of the pandemic, it benefited from an explosion in demand for virtual career events, but, when in-person restrictions began to decline, the product team's primary goal became retention.
I worked directly with the VP of Product to explore functionality that would provide enough value to get users to log in daily. This expanded into several research and design initiatives that focused on ATS/CRM type product features.
I worked with leadership, sales, and marketing to understand our needs and goals, and I worked with Product Managers and Developers to get the best possible designs launched and in customers' hands.
Brazen was built on an event-by-event framework, this created some repetitive workflows involving exporting and consolidating many excel spreadsheets.
As part of our initial alignment with stakeholders, I built out some clear user flows to clearly articulate where users encounter frustration when collecting data across multiple events.
The existing workflow was time consuming, prone to human error, and in many cases did not even address users' primary needs.
Stakeholders had strong opinions about how to solve and prioritize an large constellation of related problems and opportunities. I brought cross-functional cohorts together through design exercises to transform their induvidual areas of expertise into actionable design artifacts.
Members of marketing, sales, product, and engineering highlighted the pain points they saw in a typical user workflow, brainstormed root cause, and refocused their narrow perspectives into a wider team-aligned objective.
With clear objective starting to come together, we were able to run more narrow discovery interviews with our internal customer-facing teams and directly with customers to build an updated body of feedback to better grasp the needs of recruiters and align this data with previous research.
I transformed the wealth of data we collected into five well supported insights that could drive the next steps of the design process.
I organized and presented the research to a cross functional team, and leadership gave us approval to move forward.
With a greenlight from our stakeholders, I held a session with product managers to explore what solutions they felt were most important from their perspective.
We made a big list of features that had been discussed, highlighted pros and cons. We decided that starting with a candidate dashboard and list was the most important next step.
To kick off the initiative, I held a design session with the Product manager assigned to the project and the VP of Product to use some low fidelity components to build out some initial concepts of the design.
It was a helpful exercise to ensure the team was on the same page about what elements were critical for success. It also gave us shared language to discuss the designs moving forward, as well a core direction.
With clear goals defined and foundational user research available for reference, I was able to take these initial concepts through a lightning fast cycle of design, validate, and improve.
Starting with low-fidelity mockups, I explored the many possible ways the design could be approached, and through guerilla user testing, I was able to change and refine the designs until we felt confident in a polished first draft.
With a design that solidly satisfied internal subject matter experts and tested well with users "off the street", we worked with the sales team to get five customers on board with testing a high fidelity mockup and help us identify how closely we felt the design would match our expectations.
Some stakeholders felt that the design was worth moving forward without usertesting, but I fought for the importance of validating these designs. As a compromise, we fast-tracked these user tests while preparing everything for an upcoming sprint to ensure we would not bottle-neck the team's velocity.
Every customer we talked to was wildly positive about the design, and excited for us to implement even a fraction of the features we offered. Which gave us good confidence to move forward with development. There were some significant points raised, but nothing that could not be addressed in future iterations.
From the user tests we did uncover a few minor tweaks to help improve the users' workflow. Once we started to get the design into development, there were also technical hurdles that needed to be solved, and I worked with developers on places where the design might need to be altered to accommodate a better technical solution.
With several versions and revisions complete, it was good to have a single complete mockup to help answer any questions developers might have, and to help explain the feature to our internal teams.
As of the writing of this case study, the candidate dashboard and list are being rolled out to a subset of our customers as an early access program. We're excited to collect data on actual usage of the features, and we are currently refining our approach for running customer interviews to help prioritize future enhancements to the product.