I bring a mature design process that is a blend of industry standards and professional experience from across market sectors, platforms, form factors and user segments. I am looking to work with, or grow, an inspired and inventive design team.

Program Comparison

As part of a specialized mini-site dedicated to helping users understand a significant set of changes to their retirement savings, Providence Health & Services System Retirement Office (PH&S) needed to communicate what was going to happen to people’s balances.

Each user would log in and see a set of tables corresponding to the plans they were enrolled in. Those tables would show their balances as of retirement ages with their current program structure (a program is a mix of plans), and then show the same table of data for comparison after the program changes went into affect on Jan 1, 2010.

The inset image was a first draft I made of what those “tables” would look like.  The client had asked specifically for this as a design.  As it was my first few weeks on the job, I drew up the tables, and then set to work convincing people this was a bad idea.

I was sure that people who logged in would have trouble trying to find meaningful information in the WALL of data. It was also difficult with this table focus to try and draw out meaning or knowledge because the design and IA was so flat. I felt like the communication effort was doomed to fail. As a horse to water, I had little confidence that users would be able or willing to work through this by themselves to try and understand what was happening.

Program Comparison Tables

At first I set out to ask a lot of questions about what exactly was being communicated. Initially I understood very little about retirement programs, and what all these numbers and terms meant. I could see that they were comparing something, but what were they trying to help people understand, know, feel?  Nobody was very good at speaking that language as the client and the firm I worked with were so data/development focused that they were both quite satisfy to simply present the data as is.

I determined that a potentially new interface needed to communicate a few things very strongly:

1. Things are changing
2. Here’s where you are
3. Here’s where you will be

The new interface also needed to support a projection calculator that would allow people to experiment with different values that were assumed to see how changes in income, and time might affect them in regards to the new plan.

With my new richer understanding of what was changing I set up this tabbed panel to separate the proposed calculator functionality from the “things are changing” display. I felt like this message was complicated enough, and could be viewed as a task/goal completely independent of calculations on the very same set of numbers.

My major design focus was to create visual hierarchy, simplicity, accurate and meaningful presentation of information (vs. just data) and help users create understanding by suggesting relationships between things in terms of change, balance, past and future, and making the experience seem somewhat personal, professional, safe, and honest.

Initially I was simply focused on how to display this tabular data. Having met that responsibility early, I started engaging in a large learning process about PH&S programs. I helped to define new use cases focused more strongly on accommodating user needs, user mindset, and information clarity. I wholly authored a new design and produced the wireframes that would become the exact visual guidance for the final product. No additional visual design was done beyond the simplicity of the wireframes displayed here. There simply wasn’t time, initiative, or existing capability to do so. I communicated the design approach to the client directly and helped to manage the change in mindset, and sell the design as superior in it’s ability to communicate the right information, and tone, and meet the larger user goal of making people feel (mostly) ok with the major changes they were set to experience.