Tags
UX DesignUX ResearchHiringLeadershipManagementStrategyDesignOpsResearchOpsFront-end development
Date
Projects
Role
UX Lead/Front-end developer
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About
Equiem is a PropTech startup building powerful tools to connect building managers, building owners, tenants, retailers and other suppliers to enable community building, facilities management and safety and security logistics all through a single portal.
Summary
I joined as a front-end developer and in that remit I primarily focused on a system-wide strategic refactoring process, establishing their first design system and DesignOps processes and shifting from a custom-code white/label system to a configurable product model. As UX Lead I hired the UX team and led strategic discovery research and concept development processes for key projects. In this role I worked closely with the engineering team, stakeholders, and other key members of the company to to break down barriers and encourage collaborative design and provide as much context for the product team as possible.
- As their first UX Lead, I hired a team of UX designers and managed them across multiple projects
- I kickstarted the UX team and moved from straight visual design to developer workflow to an integrated UX research, UX design and UX testing workflow with a strong emphasis on reusable styles and styleguides over high fidelity mockups.
- I led multiple Design Sprints on key strategic projects to evaluate product ideas
- Led 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 started the company moving towards a design system approach and helped the team transfer their old code to the new paradigm.
- I worked to streamline a Drupal front-end made up of 50+ subthemes to turn all customisable assets into configuration through the UI, rather than a product that needed engineering work each time a client customisation came through.
- I started "Front and as back end" as a philosophy on the product team in order to get rid of the generic "out of the box" Drupal administrator theme and make the product have a unified admin and end-user experience and app-like feeling.
- As UX lead I brought in best practice Lean UX methodologies to the team by championing research and testing through interviews, contextual inquiry, focus groups, surveys, quantitative research, persona creation, usability testing, user flows, affinity mapping, internal and external workshops, prototyping, sketching, feature prioritisation, roadmap creation and more. I shifted the overall approach from assumption-based to research-based, with delivery driven by testing with real users.