Milly Schmidt | design and product

As a Senior UX Designer at UsabilityHub I am building a product that legitimately makes design better by democratizing research. If you haven't tried it, go and run a test now. It really changes the game. I'm a T-shaped person in a T-shaped role here, working closely with CX, leadership, developers and support to collaboratively build new product ideas based on customer feedback.

As the organised of IxDA Melbourne I am nurturing a community of human-centered designers to come together and learn from each other. I'm focused on breaking down barriers between design disciplines and having big conversations about the kind of things that designers should be thinking about, not just pixels and palettes.

As a Senior UX Designer at RMIT Online I established multiple UX processes and feedback loops to help bring student and teacher feedback into the process of building new courses and refining the delivery model. I developed design ops templates and processes around "end of first run" depth interviews, usability testing for learning activity design, led the design guild, and also developed a component-driven approach and refactor for the HTML/CSS front-end of online courses in the edX LMS, including moving their existing code to Sass and Git. I advised on and campaigned successfully for a platform migration and helping to develop resources and tools to increase engagement through a series of measurable Lean experiments. I also increased their survey response rates through survey design improvements and have developed a centralised feedback repository where insights from interviews, surveys and emails are collected, collated and labelled in a transparent way so teams can draw on them in their sprint planning or instantly solve problems as hotfixes.

I was Director of product and design at a rapidly evolving CX startup RateIt where I managed a team of software engineers, a junior product manager and a graphic designer. I hired a senior UXer, started their component library and design system, shifted a team into a productive agile process, created a practice of human-centred design and was a damn good manager. I was part of the senior leadership team and helped shape strategy, OKRs and culture.

I've inspired girls and women by investing my time into events, workshops, hackathons and mentorships with Code Like a Girl. In particular, I'm proud of a research project I did with them, investigating through a series of depth interviews the experience of secondary school teachers attempting to teach tech skills through the Victorian Digitech Curriculum. I developed their HTML/CSS class offering and have taught both children and adults, including a series of workshops at the Microsoft Store in Sydney.

I've volunteered my time to causes I care about with Girls In Tech, Girl Geek Academy, Girl Geek Dinners, Ladies that UX and other organisations trying to increase diversity in the technology industry. I particularly care about visibility and representation for technical roles for women and non-binary people as well as pay equity.

I worked with Circle In to help them re-think their UI to consolidate their two different career advice portals for parents into a unified experience with research and co-design workshops.

I've taught more classes than I can count at General Assembly. I developed and delivered successful classes around Agile/Scrum, UX fundamentals and HTML/CSS basics. I have consistently recieved high ratings on my teaching style and content.

I kickstarted a culture of design, research, testing and lean product development as acting head of design at EstimateOne. I worked closely with their head of product and product team leaders to engage in various qualitative research initiatives, and I mentored their UI designer to develop his UX skills and take his designs to users as prototypes to get feedback through usability testing. I also helped the team here understand UX methods and tools that they hadn't encountered before, including a particular deep dive into usability testing.

I built a content strategy and relaunched a killer website for ItStrategic. This included depth interviews with various staff members and exploration and analysis of their current customer base and their needs, a site audit and analysis, ideation, card sorting and prototyping, through to a site build and brand development with the help of Rosie Ren.

I refactored a huge amount of code into a robust React component system (deleting more code than I added!) and helped refine and improve the onboarding flow (through some deep and thorough user research and testing) at fin-tech startup Clover. I also worked closely with an inspirational cross-functional team of experts to run an amazing Design Sprint (chatbots!) and conduct various rigorous and effective research and design projects around complex financial products and data visualisation. We increased their acquisition rate by around 40% through optimisation and UI/UX improvements, and I designed their dashboard and iOS app concepts.

I designed and built a pluggable, customisable, scalable and re-usable multi-site theme system architecture and grew a team of UX designers at Equiem. I also led Design Sprints and an in-depth research and Lean product validation process around a "Click and Collect" product, including user flows, depth interviews, wireframes, prototypes and data analysis.

I led a team of developers building Drupal-based CMS solutions at Godel. Some highlight projects included building an online e-commerce store for Pavement Brands, creating an interactive creative onboarding quiz for high-end fashion brand 2-Times, working with mental health organisations Neami National and MHFA, collaborating with larger Drupal agencies Technocrat and PreviousNext to develop the front-end code for government sites for AIFS and DHS, as well as Carey Baptist Grammar School, The Wilderness Society, Fred Hollows Foundation and more.

I co-founded and built much of SaaS project management app Estimate Work.

I've written multiple articles for international business news and culture publication Quartz about mindfulness, pop culture and more.

I worked with Beat magazine to build an online version of their magazine that helped streamline their editorial workflow. I redesigned their website as well as developed tech solutions to take their whole submission and publication process online-first, with automated exports to their print magazine.