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User Research & Product Design in the climate technology space.

illustrations

Human Centered Design for Volvo Group

in my role as .masters candidate

glue-mida
  • Context Sponsored by Volvo Group & MACK Trucks, part of recent graduate study at Carnegie Mellon.

  • Key Stakeholders | Feature development for industrial-electric vehicles, sponsored by Volvo Group & MACK trucks to improve the experiences of drivers and other stakeholders in the commercial electric vehicle industry.

  • Our Mission To learn and improve as product innovators and to motivate change in a legacy company to help underserved users.

Contributions

  • User Research | Conducted 15+ extensive interviews & deployed surveys {n=187} to research & validate product requirements.

  • Human Centered Design | Participated with our team of 6 Carnegie Mellon students through a comprehensive integrated design & product definition process (detailed below).

  • Led the final delivery phase of our 6 month process.

mida-in-progress

Outcomes

  • Useful, usable, and desirable design for sponsors and users.

  • User focused innovation presented to the product & innovation teams at Volvo Group and MACK Trucks.

MIDA-CAD

Process For Human Centered Design Project

Ideate
Alpha
Bravo
Charlie
Delta
Elephant
Flamingo
Goose
Hellion
Imaginary
Joker

Carp Solutions
Organic Plant Food

in my role as .Designer/Executor

  • Our Mission Create a new economy based on sustainable fishing practices to replace the harmful chemical-agricultural techniques that dominate our food production in the western US.

  • Context Improving a public domain fish-protein-hydrolysate manufacturing process from an old USDA journal then building a business.

Contributions

  • Design | Conceptualized product roadmap from market opportunity & product definition, through launch and growth, then balanced features informed by both user feedback and manufacturing requirements.

  • DFM | Created a new supply chain by applying commercial salmon fishing techniques in a new domain, and rapid prototyping. Then built a multi-channel distribution system by finding and developing channel partnerships.

  • User research | Customer interviews, co-design sessions, web analytics.

  • Package Design | Maintained ISDA compliance (don't get me started), lead a design team to create packaging for 3 retail SKUs.

  • CPM | Opened new sales channels, maintained channel partner relationships, developed referral program,

Carpe Carpum Sample Size

Outcomes

  • 3 retail SKUs with strong customer retention and a fantastic brand.

  • Improved the product over time through customer feedback.

  • Exited the business with a rich collection of failures and lessons learned.

Carpe Carpum Sample Size
Carpe Carpum Brand In-store display

Why look at this?

  • Look at the SIZE of this problem!

  • This was an honest attempt to improve water quality across the entire western continent.

  • If we could remove enough harmful fish, AND replace chemigation techniques with good old fashioned carbon-sequestering plant food in one step it would dramatically improve our wetland ecosystems.

The Giant Pineapple Shaved Ice

in my role as .Designer/owner

  • Our Mission Create a delightful, contactless service experience for customers.

  • Context Haven't we all thought about owning a food truck? The recent global pandemic was my team's opportunity to provide a contactless social experience and flip a food truck.

Contributions

  • Design | Assessed a new market opportunity and designed a service to match.

  • Marketing | Created brand identity, developed assets, Go-to-market planning and deployment.

  • User research | Interviewed competitors customers to identify and prioritize product differentiators.

  • Leadership | Led a team to improve and operate a mobile food service business.

  • Management | Scaled the business with structured customer feedback. Kept the books and staffed the company.

Outcomes

  • Product market fit.

  • Sold business for profit (+24.1% ROIC) after 2 years profitable operation & summer wages for the team.

  • Delightful product for thousands of happy customers.

Why look at this?

  • Is running a small business better than an MBA? I don't honestly know, but I do know that we CRUSHED it!

  • This little side project created SIX freaking jobs during the height of the COVID pandemic.

  • We orchestrated a service to absolutely delight thousands of people in troubled times.

Envision Yoga Mats online store

in my role as .designer/developer

  • The Mission Learn to host an online store outside of CMS environments and build on HTML/CSS skills.

  • Context I noticed a collection of terrible products on Amazon, and want to build an alternative. After co-design with a manufacturer and a big import/shipping rodeo I have a garage full of excellent yoga mats and this web project is to help me sell them.

Contributions

  • Market research | Deployed web scrapers on Amazon reviews to inform product definition and value opportunity analysis.

  • Design | Co-designed with the finest exercise mat manufacturers in Guangdong Province.

  • Connected manufacturing specifications (size, thickness, color, material selection) to features and benefits from user research.

  • Developed product and brand identity from competition research.

  • Illustrated the functional and decorative elements for the exercise mat to drive meaningful product differentiation in a saturated market

Envision Cart page screenshot

Outcomes

  • Novel product innovation for yoga mats.

  • An online shop for my product development experimentation.

  • Learned about Github & version control.

  • Still selling yoga mats

Envision mats landing page screenshot

Why look at this?

  • I design and build functional e-commerce platforms.

  • I play nicely with manufacturers.

  • You should buy a yoga mat. They are honestly great and I have so many in my garage.

Nyxt - open source Lisp web browser

in my role as .UX Lead

Nyxt browser

The Product

  • Programmable, keyboard driven web browser.

  • Unusual & powerful modal interaction model.

  • Extensible in Lisp to the point of madness

My Mission

  • Help the engineering team develop a novel product to machine augment the web browsing experience for super users.

Customer Context

  • Programmers need three things to operate; a coding environment, a terminal, and a browser. This straightforward use case has millions of permutations, and our ongoing work is to bring open source programmability to the browser part.

Contributions

Strategy

  • Established pre-series-A milestones.

  • Conducted business model innovation process.

  • Designed and conducted mission critical Lean Startup experiments.

  • Established product metrics.

  • Defined market opportunity and conducted experiments for three business models.

People Research

  • Conducted 20+ user interviews and 2 surveys.

  • Completed JTBD task analysis.

  • Validated customer personas with user research.

  • Validated customer journey (pains, gains).

Interaction Design

  • Persistently nudged engineers to prioritize positive early user interactions (~380 UX related Github contributions in a 16 month period).

  • Published a tutorial for new customers.

  • Published instructional video series.

Interface/UI Work

  • Collaboratively structured, then delivered the visual design system & coherent brand identity.

  • Designed and delivered several beautiful theme extensions.

  • Delivered layout and written content for the homepage-conversion-machine.

  • Illustrated compelling graphics for published content.

Results

Strategic Outcomes

  • Provided much needed business model clarity, and changed the fundamental output of the project from assorted code to validated learning.

  • Tested and confirmed value hypothesis & growth hypothesis.

  • A system for observing demand in our early-adopter niche.

  • Data validated monetization strategy to carry the company forward for years to come.

  • Identified a Blue/Purple Ocean of competing factors.

Research Outcomes

  • Delivered valuable context for narrowing the scope of engineering efforts.

  • Published content for community engagement, data driven insights for discovery phase.

  • Communicated customer requirements to engineers and beyond.

  • Prioritized product roadmap with data and a clear product strategy.

Interaction Design Outcomes

  • Dramatically improved early user experience to increase user activation.

  • Improved activated user experience & product visibility.

UI Outcomes

  • Simplified and unified thousands of decisions in ongoing interface development.

  • Launched paid extensions that you can buy today.

  • Attractive homepage with increased conversion rate.

  • Delightful illustrations that communicate the purpose of the product.

Nyxt youtube

Why look at this?

  • Impactful user research in complex domain.

  • Magnificently broad interaction point.

  • These designs increase user activation.

  • Product market fitting in action!

Workplace Design at CMU

in my role as .masters candidate

Context

  • My previous career was selling and installing photovoltaic solar systems.

  • That industry is a hot mess and I wanted to generate some insights to improve a few small parts of it.

The Project

  • Elaborating human dimensions in the process of selling solar PV systems.

  • Learn a great design process and elaborate a better way for people to navigate buying solar panels.

Why look at this?

  • Condensing research into helpful visual artifacts to build empathy across roles.

  • Watch me pull big insights from small parts of workflows.

Designing for manufacturing & assembly

in my role as .masters candidate

  1. Team

  2. Toaster

  3. Substitutes

  4. Disassemble

  5. Re-assemble

  6. Part Efficiency

  7. Functional Reqs.

  8. Insights

We begin by forming a cross-functional team.

dfms-1

Designing for manufacturing & assembly

in my role as .graduate student

  1. Team

  2. Toaster

  3. Substitutes

  4. Disassemble

  5. Re-assemble

  6. Part Efficiency

  7. Functional Reqs.

  8. Insights

Next we select an existing product from our problem space to explore.

dfms-2

This toaster will do nicely.

Designing for manufacturing & assembly

in my role as .masters candidate

  1. Team

  2. Toaster

  3. Substitutes

  4. Disassemble

  5. Re-assemble

  6. Part Efficiency

  7. Functional Reqs.

  8. Insights

At this stage we identify substitute products and assess product reviews.

Our purpose here is to elaborate customer requirements and establish importance for each subsystem.

Designing for manufacturing & assembly

in my role as .masters candidate

  1. Team

  2. Toaster

  3. Substitutes

  4. Disassemble

  5. Re-assemble

  6. Part Efficiency

  7. Functional Reqs.

  8. Insights

With care and a recording device -- we disassemble the toaster, recording detailed observations for each component, and labeling meticulously.

Designing for manufacturing & assembly

in my role as .masters candidate

  1. Team

  2. Toaster

  3. Substitutes

  4. Disassemble

  5. Re-assemble

  6. Part Efficiency

  7. Functional Reqs.

  8. Insights

Rebuild the product, completing a cost assessment for each component.

Re-assembly provides an opportunity to really consider each component individually and to identify candidate parts for elimination.

Designing for manufacturing & assembly

in my role as .masters candidate

  1. Team

  2. Toaster

  3. Substitutes

  4. Disassemble

  5. Re-assemble

  6. Part Efficiency

  7. Functional Reqs.

  8. Insights

Using our component level observations we can now calculate the important cost analysis factors: assembly efficiency and part count efficiency.

Empowered by this thorough cost analysis, we then bring our attention back to the product as a whole problem solving unit.

Designing for manufacturing & assembly

in my role as .masters candidate

  1. Team

  2. Toaster

  3. Substitutes

  4. Disassemble

  5. Re-assemble

  6. Part Efficiency

  7. Functional Reqs.

  8. Insights

Armed with our cost analysis we elaborate the product's functional requirements; main, critical, and auxiliary, along the lines of material, energy, and information flow.

Designing for manufacturing & assembly

in my role as .masters candidate

  1. Team

  2. Toaster

  3. Substitutes

  4. Disassemble

  5. Re-assemble

  6. Part Efficiency

  7. Functional Reqs.

  8. Insights

Finally we organize insights and sketch concepts for improvement.

From here we can do it all: simplify the existing design, reduce manufacturing costs, prioritize features, develop new forms. Even cook bread!