Case Studies

The following are four User Experience Design (UED) projects, each following a four-part outline: Problem / Opportunity, Challenge, Solution, and Positive Outcome.

01Auto Dealership Inventory SegmentationCox Automotive
02Clothing Subscription ReturnsNadine West
03HR Case Management — “Blue”Dovetail
04ProDeploy Deployment VerificationDell

Design Thinking

I generally use these phases of the Design Thinking methodology:

01Empathize
02Define
03Ideate
04Prototype
05Test

Case Study Outline

Each project below follows this four-part structure:

Problem / Opportunity: What was the challenge that needed solving.
Challenge: The specific design problem to be addressed.
Solution: How the problem was approached and solved.
Positive Outcome: The measurable result of the work.

Cox Automotive

Auto Dealership Inventory Segmentation

Create Auto Dealership Inventory Segmentation App to Automate Vehicle Data Distribution to Online Channels

Duration6 Weeks

TeamMyself, Product Owner

Problem / Opportunity: Cox Automotive saw a market opportunity and hired me to create an app that allowed auto dealerships to define segments of vehicle inventory based on vehicle attributes in order to apply rules such as third-party marketing, seasonal pricing, and promotional events.
Challenge: Define what segmentation means and how it works, and design an app that’s intuitively useful with no need for support or documentation.
Solution: Rapid prototype using Google Material for medium-fidelity wireframes. Tested using a static clickthrough prototype on InvisionApp, inviting select users to try it out and give feedback.
Positive Outcome: “How soon can I use this?”

Nadine West

Clothing Subscription Returns

Redesign a Slow, Error-Prone Returns Workflow Into a 10x Faster Process

Duration1 Week

TeamMyself

Problem / Opportunity: Returns are the money-maker for Nadinewest.com — and they were losing money because employees were using software that was difficult, slow, and error-prone. The interface was too hard to scan quickly.
Challenge: Identify the core user task and design a solution to minimize revenue loss. The core task was defined as comparison.
Solution: Redesigned the app to empower users to complete faster returns with minimal errors: card layouts with large images, prominent SKU and pick-location data, category icons for rapid visual anchoring, and clear counts of returned vs. retained items.
Positive Outcome: 10x faster process. Users delight!

Dovetail

HR Case Management — “Blue”

Simplify a Convoluted, Crowded HR Case Management Interface

Duration4 Weeks

TeamMyself, Product Dev Team

Problem / Opportunity: Dovetail Software’s flagship product, code-named “Blue,” made user tasks slow and cumbersome due to a convoluted and crowded interface.
Challenge: Surface the primary user task per screen and submerge secondary and tertiary functionality.
Solution: Reduced “UI awareness” to focus on tasks, created consistent UI layout patterns, and defined primary, secondary, and tertiary tasks across the product.
Positive Outcome: Clear, quick task completion. User’s delight!

ProDeploy Deployment Verification

Cut Deployment Verification From 3 Weeks to Under 60 Seconds

Duration1 Month

TeamMyself, 2 Engineering SMEs

Problem / Opportunity: Deployment verification of servers, storage, and network solutions was lengthy, costly, and error-prone.
Challenge: Validate 80,000 configuration attributes remotely to verify deployment against sales-order specifications.
Solution: Working with two engineering SMEs, I designed a solution that checked 80,000 configuration attributes remotely and produced a PDF report of mismatches, errors, and severity codes — empowering the deployment verification team to quickly course-correct.
Positive Outcome: Reduced deployment verification time from 3 weeks to under 60 seconds, saving Dell millions in annual revenue loss.

Assets under NDA