Portfolio

Below are a selection of projects I’ve worked on in recent years. My goal is to showcase some of the various product management and user experience techniques and methodologies my teams and I have used depending on the specific needs of a project. This includes the following areas I specialize in:

• Product discovery (using design thinking to solve user and business problems and improve product/market fit – see my article Usable yet Useless: Why Every Business Needs Product Discovery in A List Apart)
• Product management (developing product vision and strategy, customer journey mapping, functional specifications at the right fidelity, designing systems to ensure great execution)
• Development process design (understanding the needs of developers and the rest of the business, and designing a development process that fits the culture of the organization and gets everyone involved in an appropriate way)
• User experience research (ethnography, heuristic evaluations, usability testing, participatory design, concept testing, surveys)
• Content strategy (content audits, style guides, content creation)
• Interaction design (flow diagrams, wireframes and prototypes, concept development)

In short, I focus on helping teams develop their digital product strategy, and I help make the strategy real by designing and building products that deliver measurable business results. I further help teams create and execute software development processes that are efficient and tailored to the unique needs of the business.

If you’d like to find out more or discuss working together, you can view my LinkedIn profile, or send me an email.

Flow Interactive (May 2012 — current)

Roles

• Director of User Experience

Selected projects

• Direct Axis — contextual interviews, personas, customer journey mapping, UX strategy
• Obox — usability testing (see the client’s write-up of the process)
• Vumi Go — personas, customer journey mapping, interaction design, usability testing, graphic design (in progress, not launched yet)
• Takealot — personas, customer journey mapping, interaction design, graphic design, front-end development (in progress, not launched yet)
• ificould — information architecture, interaction design (see ificould.co.za)
• Primedia — user research, UX strategy, concept development
• Discover Africa — Product Discovery and UX strategy
• Design Indaba — Product Discovery and Product Management coaching

Below are some images that show our work process on selected projects

Initial interface sketch:

Prototype in Axure:

Persona workshop aftermath:

Sketch for a new checkout process:

Note-taking during research:

Analysis after research:

Initial customer journey sketch:

Final customer journey, on client’s office wall:

kalahari.com (December 2010 – May 2012)

I recently wrote Case study: the user experience of kalahari.com, one year later, in which I go over many of our accomplishments in 2011.

Roles

• Head of Product Management
• Head of User Experience Design

Selected projects

• Established a successful product development process from idea conception and prioritization to processes for design cycles, functional specifications, and technical implementation
• Introduced a systematic approach to user-centered design, including user research and UX-driven interaction & visual design
• Created the Product Council, a cross-functional body of leaders who steer the prioritization and roadmap for kalahari.com
• Ongoing redesign of the entire kalahari.com front-end through regular, incremental improvements to the user experience.
• Facilitated user experience and product management workshops with sister companies in Cape Town and South-East Asia.
• Some success metrics:
  • Checkout redesign: 7% increase in completion rate
  • Registration redesign: 18% increase in completion rate

Selected artifacts from projects

Customer journey map:

 

Development process:

 

Wireframe for Checkout redesign:

  Final Checkout redesign (produced by Visual Designers)

Yola.com (October 2009 — November 2010)

Roles

• Product Management
• User experience design

Selected projects

• Main website: Led the redesign of the Yola website, resulting in a 25% increase in first-time visitor sign-up conversion and a 10% decrease in bounce rate
• User account area (My Yola): Led the redesign of My Yola from basic sites listing to full-fledged account and site management area
• All payment/checkout flows: Led the redesign of payment screens that resulted in 28% increase in completion rate for domain purchases
• Sign up and user onramp: Led redesign of sign-up flow that resulted in 44% increase in the number of websites published with Yola
• Revenue-generating products (e.g, bundled packages): Led design and implementation of a revamped Pro package that resulted in a 280% increase in revenue from the package

Selected artifacts from projects

Flow diagram for redesigned bundled packages purchase flow

 

 

High-fidelity mockup for new home page (produced by Visual Designers)

eBay (April 2005 – October 2009)

Roles

• User experience research
• Product strategy

Selected projects

• Responsible for the planning, execution and business impact of eBay’s Product Health program, which is a holistic research program that drives global product strategy and resource allocation through insights from a variety of user assessments of our site experience. We utilized surveys, true-intent studies, advanced in-page analytics, site logs/web analytics, and qualitative insights.
• Managed the team that executes the program, and worked with leaders across the design, business and engineering organizations to develop product strategy based on the insights, and provide success metrics to measure the impact of product changes.
• Collaborated across functions to write and scope requirements for new products and changes to existing features, from product discovery through execution.
• Products worked on included Home Page, Search, My eBay, Registration, Seller listing page, and eBay Daily Deals.