Recently
A major project in the last year at ICE Mortgage Technologies was to provide the User Experience
point-of-view of how the company should consider integrations of products across the product line. I
presented the resulting deck to C-level leadership, and they asked it to be pushed down to product
management and for them to use it to plan. I then led workshops with the product management teams to
determine an integration path. The content of these articles, with my VP's comments on the business, is
a result of the activity.
Articles derived from our strategy to integrate products.
UX Design Considerations for Acquisitions: Standalone Products
Making acquisitions part of your UX family - A model, a menu and
addressing standalone products. (Part 1 of 3)
bootcamp.uxdesign.cc
UX design considerations for acquisitions: Product Integrations
Your company bought a product they want to integrate into existing
products… (Part 2 of 3)
bootcamp.uxdesign.cc
UX design considerations for acquisitions: Product Ecosystem
You company bought a product and now it’s up to you to consider the
ecosystem as part of the UX integration effort. (Part 3 of 3)
bootcamp.uxdesign.cc
I led a number of workshops with VPs of product management, their teams, and engineering to understand
how
technologies should be considered. One of the more complex ones was how automation would impact the
whole ecosystem.
Ran workshops to help leadership unpack flows
A very fulfilling activity was to run workshops with teams to help them unpack a problem and set
strategic direction. For these, we had them talk about the area's background and contexts that affect
deciding direction. From there, we listed issues and how hard they would be to solve or implement. Then
we had product management and engineering discuss phases and the requirements for the phases to be
successful.
Ran workshops to help teams and leadership set strategic direction
I worked closely with my friend David Abkowitz on Dim Sum, ICE Mortgage's design
system. I wrote much of the usage guidelines. An important aspect was putting component alternatives
early in a guideline so users would understand to choose the right one before thinking about configuring
one that was not appropriate.
Wrote Usage Guidelines for the Design System
The mortgage user journey has a complex communications network. I created an interactive visualization to help
people understand it. While building it in Observable took extra time, doing so made it easy to update
as we learned more about the ecosystem.
Built visualizations to interactively explore complex domains
Case Study - Insights
I was originally hired to design the company’s first analytics product, a visualization application of
mortgage data. Insights was a multi-year
project whose user experience I architected and led the user experience production.
Timeline of process to design and build Insights
I worked with my friend and user researcher Kathi Olsen to organize the
data so we could decide what comments users wanted answered.
From user research we collated comments
I selected a set of ways we could organize the data, including the analytical direction, data required,
and which roles would be interested in the results.
We organized the data around these groups
From there, Kathi and I held workshops with the team, including product management, subject matter
experts, and engineering to classify the data.
The team working through the analysis. Me in burgundy short-sleeve shirt.
This resulted in three aspects we could use to make decisions: the data needed, the users a question
would appeal to, and whether the question would be a trend, comparison, or prediction.
We then spent a workshop ideating on the best direction the overall user experience should take. This
resulted in an "inquiry" based direction - i.e., Answering specific user comments versus a dashboard or
other visualization structure.
I believe the best designs are created when they are guided by strong principles. While there are
implicit ones every digital experience should have, the explicit ones we choose differentiate a product.
The design principles I suggested, and we adopted
From there, I started wireframing a number of directions. The middle and right ones explored whether we
could put controls over the map like a game HUD. In the end, it was too difficult to resolve visual
interference issues, and the map had a delineated space.
The progression of wireframes
Once high-fidelity wireframes were locked down, we took them out to users and tested the design.
The user feedback received from initial wireframe designs
At the conference that we released Insights our booth was set up to gather more of users' analytics
comments. Extending the product ended up being difficult because, instead of making all of the
components modular as UX asked, they made each page a unit.
Further user research to understand additional comments to develop