Yipit “Deal Wallet”

Yipit hired me to help them conceptualize and design a new feature to help users save and organize all the deals they buy. Yipit is fortunate to have very passionate users who were more than happy to help in the user testing process. My first task was to understand how users do this today (without a feature). What we found was that people have different ways of achieving this in mainly manual ways. Whether it be a spreadsheet or a paper calendar with deals written into days it was clear that there is a need for a better way to automate the process.

I conducted two different user testing sessions with the same three users to first uncover problems and challenges and then to test design solutions. Random design ideas came up during the process and through discussion. The user testing in this case was an invaluable part of the process that helped us hone in on the right solution.

Project Deliverables: Strategy, Conceptualization, User Testing & Research, Wireframes, Visual Design

Eco-Mail Development, LLC

I worked with the Eco-mail team to build and design the user experience from research and sketch to visual design for a native iPad app that rethinks paperless mail. Eco-mail allows consumers to receive, pay and store all of their first-class mail in one mobile location. More than just bill presentment, Eco-mail captures the users complete first-class mail experience from receiving mail to organizing, paying, storing and sharing mail.

While the team had a rough prototype there was still discovery work to be done to finely pinpoint and define the target users. We defined four main target users and started by putting personas and then stories together for each. From there, I put a process in place to get the best ideas from the team through a series of discussions and then group collaborative sketching.

Project Deliverables: Personas, Stories, Sketches, Wireframes and Visual Design.

Client Testimonial
“Jess is fantastic to work with. It is difficult to express how much value she brought to the project. She took our rough ideas about UI/UX and improved them immensely. She completely immersed herself in understanding our philosophy and technical approach to paperless mail and became a complete member of the team. She brought great new design ideas to the project and equally importantly, stood her ground to prevent us from implementing some of our bad design ideas. In addition to great design ideas, Jess is very responsive and works quickly. Overall, working with Jess has been a great experience.”

- Jay Maller, Eco-Mail Development, LLC (August, 2012)

LocalVox

LocalVox is the content publishing platform of Nearsay a local news aggregation site. Local business and companies use LocalVox to publish content like news, events and deals to the highly targeted Nearsay community. Nearsay hired me to help design and build the publishing platform. With a very tight timeline, we started by looking at the many publishing tools already available to people and discussing features and interactions. Taking some inspiration from this with a focus on our goals and business requirements we sketched out high-level concepts and ideas for the LocalVox platform. Moving quickly to wireframes and then visual design.

Project Deliverables: Strategy, User Testing, Wireframes, Visual Design

Tweat.it

Tweat.it is New York City’s only real-time food truck map. Co-produced by myself and Joel Potischman – we designed and built this service so it would be easier to find mobile food vendors that change location everyday. Tweat.it makes it easy to find the mobile food vendors closest to you right now. Whether you are at your desk or on the go, seeing the city’s most unique mobile food vendors on a map in real-time means you can find your next meal in seconds.

My role as co-founder included bringing the app to life from concept to execution (with the other Co-Founder Joel) as well as the design of mobile apps for both the Android and iPhone platforms.

See it: http://tweat.it

Mashable says: “Tweat.it is the coolest thing we’ve ever seen.”

Blog Post: Tweat.it for Android is Has Arrived

Scoop St.

This homepage redesign project started with some basic conceptual sketches produced using Adobe Ideas. An initial round of sketches illustrated multiple directions for the homepage, which was followed by wireframes of the direction that was chosen. The wireframes addressed not only layout and how new elements were organized but also copy edit suggestions. Also and lastly produced were visual designs.

Related Blog Post: How I use Adobe Ideas

Project Deliverables: Strategy, Sketching Concepts, Wireframes, Visual Design

Client Testimonial
“We brought on Jess to help us design our member referral system from the ground-up, including a fresh design that fit Scoop St. branding requirements but also a smart interface that would make sharing our deals as easy as possible. I can’t speak highly enough of Jess’ holistic approach to usability design, as it really showed on our referral system.”

- David Ambrose, VP of Business Development, Scoop St., (August, 2011)

Postling

Postling provides small businesses with the tools, alerts, and insights to get the most out of social media. I worked with the Postling team in early 2010 to redesign some key pieces of their product platform, specifically the dashboard interface. This process included working to define user personas, collaborative team sketching to convey and discuss ideas followed by wireframes and visual design.

Project Deliverables: Strategy, User Research, Personas, Wireframes, Visual Design

Client Testimonial
“Jess is amazing. She has the product manager skills to build out great user experiences with barebones requirements, and yet applies a rigorous process with stakeholders to make sure everyone is involved and engaged. She was even able to suggest (and mockup) new features we hadn’t even thought of.”
- David Lifson, CEO Postling, (May, 2010)