Designer & Artist
getTalent, a web recruiting software by Dice, is a lightweight ATS and a heavyweight CRM with marketing automation powers.
getTalent was releasing a V2 of their application because they were migrating their software to a new stack. They had a rough internal skeleton of the new front-end application, but it wasn’t refined in interaction or appearance. Therefore, I was hired as a consultant to redesign the UX / UI of the MVP of their V2 application.
There were a few perks while working on an MVP of a V2. There was a rich API (with a seemingly unlimited amount of endpoints) available enabling fast creation of feature-rich front-end views without requiring more resources. Also, Dice had a larger budget so there were quite a bit of development resources at disposal. The project was very hands-on with the front end development team and PMs.
That said, it was a very aggressive sprint schedule, and the user flows, styles, libraries, UX and UI were all done simultaneously.
getTalent sought to support the current brand — yet modernize it, so I gathered a few references and conducted a visual exploration.
Based off of their existing Material framework, I created a base style guide mini-site that the developers were able to import all SCSS variables and styles directly into the application. It was understood that the styles document would be malleable, so it was quite heavy in CSS modifiers and SCSS variables and mixins. I also created a component library including details such as loading states, facets, forms, blank states, animation states, and more.
There were 4 key pieces of the UX redesign including: the navigation, directories, pipeline creation and candidate profiles.
In the research phase, I conducted internal interviews, user research, competitor analysis and multiple whiteboard sessions to submit an evaluation of usability flaws, design inconsistencies, and opportunities. Then I drafted a stronger sitemap to better organize user flows. This site structure rehaul was the ground for the rest of the site for a more consistent and simple UX plan.
The navigation was refined during the user flow planning. After a few brainstorms and lo-fi prototypes, the general structure of what was necessary began to take shape. Each navigation item required an overview and directory to jump off from. The structure led to the basic site layout that then helped better organize the information globally thereon.
The Director of Product also wanted to emphasize numerical values as the beginning of reporting. So, a low friction way of providing some metrics was making tab groups larger and more prominent. The pronounced tabs then became a design pattern throughout.
The next main feature to redesign was the Create a Pipeline, which — at the time — had a very odd filtering interaction that wasn't clear to users. It was also inundated with several facets which made it overwhelming to filter quickly and efficiently.
We considered different types of logic but maintained that it was and filter logic for simplicity’s sake. So, the clear solution was to categorize the facets so a user can filter faster, easier, and more thoroughly.
The styles and categories from Create a Pipeline continued into the candidate profiles. The candidate profile had to support engagement metrics, resume support, and CRM abilities. The solution was to tab these pieces to fall in line with the global interaction of the site which was being built.
I worked on several projects with getTalent as a contractor. The team treated me as a part time employee over the course of several months. I redesigned other features and introduced several new core features to the site.
Aside from design responsibilities, I implemented systems for better management and communication with the product team. I introduced internal management systems for maintenance of styles, design assets, team member responsibilities and project organization.
I also had a local version of the application and reviewed pull requests on Github (in respect to interactions and CSS), to streamline the review process. I took some time to create these processes to increase efficiency in the team dynamics and to have consistency control. The time with getTalent was rewarding in many respects.
Kissmetrics is an analytics platform with a suite of tools to empower the marketer to optimize their marketing funnel.
I worked as a web designer at Kissmetrics under the leadership of many skilled mentors. At its core, Kissmetrics is an analytics platform that helps marketers improve their marketing performance by tracking real people.
At Kissmetrics, one of the core company values was to be better than yesterday. Growth and improvement is an ongoing priority for business growth and within yourself. Every project we undertook was measured to several baseline business objectives from signups to paid to retention to churn. Some initiatives failed, some won. Some won up to 600% spikes in marketing site traffic. Below, are two examples of winning design assets for the homepage and for the features page that increased signups.
These projects were acheived by designing and building out many landing pages, AB tests and other marketing assets. The skillset required through this work includes advanced skills in PSDs, AI, HTML & SCSS, wireframing and prototyping. The skillset that was learned during this tenureship were intermediate skills with Github and basic skills in Ruby on Rails.
Another pain point we experienced was the lack of successful onboarding and implementation of the product. We holistically looked at all details of what it takes to onboard successfully and worked on several iterative projects that led to more received custom data and less support tickets. These projects were executed in tangent and in respect to pertinent product releases.
In April 2015, Patty was promoted from Web Designer to Marketing Design Manager to more fully manage consultants and the marketing site.
Our popular blog advocated smarter marketing techniques. Below, is a redesign of the iOS Kissmetrics Blog Reader App I led. Aside from the visual refresh, we focused on creating stronger interactions and improved sharing. Another purpose of this app was to improve the Kissmetric's mobile API with its interactions. This project included several rounds of brainstorming, prototyping and revisions for it to come to its fruition.
Appcelerator has two main products: an enterprise MBaaS solution serving over 70% of the Fortune 100 called the Appcelerator Platform and a Javascript to native code compiler called Titanium with an open source developer community of 780,000.
I joined the Appcelerator team during the exciting Singly acquisition. At that time, Appcelerator was focused on selling an enterprise platform consisting of three products: Apps, Analytics, and APIs. We wanted to reinvigorate the brand, so I, heavily influenced by Parse and Urban Airship, spent a healthy amount of time redefining the brand. I redesigned the website by focusing on the platform's offerings with a trifecta emblem as a main focal piece. Here are a few examples of the website with the new brand direction.
The website was an ongoing project throughout, but the initial scope of work for the website redesign was updating the main pages on the platform's messaging. Once the website was in a good place, I then implemented the brand onto sales enablement media and leadgen projects. We produced several microsites where I delivered all aspects of usability, interaction and interface design.
The Apps portion of the enterprise platform is specific to Titanium, a compiler of JS to native mobile languages. Titans, loyal developers and evangelists, are Appcelerator’s true bread and butter. Here’s a snippet of an infographic I designed that celebrated the 500,000th developer who joined the community. See full infographic here.
Singly was an API aggregator tool that enabled easy access into social third party data. In other words, a single API. Singly was acquired by my next employer Appcelerator in 2013.
At Singly, I was a creative lead handling all things design including defining the brand. The target audience was developers and the general tone we wanted to convey was playfulness, wholesomeness and intelligence. After a healthy amount of exploration, a brand book was created. Then, all future marketing collateral maintained this new brand vision including the website, whitepapers, email templates, presentation decks, signage, marketing booth designs.
Initially, I designed and worked on a WordPress site while Singly was considered a social API aggregrator. At this point, I pushed a few commits with the help of my teammates. This was the initial step to realizing how rewarding it is to ship my own work.
After struggling with sales in the pre-built API market, executive leadership termed the former mission. Our new direction was selling the transmission of data through a uniformed API in the quantified self market, so we redid the website to reflect that mission.
To relieve some of the sales stress, we brainstormed technical charts to display the API's behavioral and security benefits. Below is a technical chart. The infrastructure is highly technical, but the design of the architecture information is very easy to digest and visually appealing. At this point, sales were on an uptick, and we were gaining momentum and higher paying clients.
Shortly afterward, Singly was acquired by my next employer Appcelerator in October, 2013.
Intersection (formerly Titan360) is the largest municipally focused media company in the U.S. I joined the team as an in house graphic design intern for Summer 2010.
In the first week of my internship, I was tasked with the challenge of coming up with a large scale train wrap design. Being that no one from the SF office has done this work, it would mean that I would be going this on my own. I created a few concepts and sent the final concept to my director. I received feedback that Taiwan Tourism liked the concept. Without any further ado, I moved onto producing work for other clients including BART dominations for Gilead Sciences.
Two weeks before my internship ended, I was informed that the Taiwan Tourism campaign concept was approved by the client. I broke my head through the ceiling as I jumped for joy.
Least to say, my internship naturally extended. The client thought the initial concept was too Chinese in nature, so they provided new images to work with. I had to create an illustrator template (since there wasn't one available) and linked it to multiple large PSDs with the new high fidelity photos they provided.
It was hard to fathom that my design work would be plastered all across town. It didn't seem like a thing that happened to a sophomore in school, or even, a thing that happened to any student. It was surreal at first when the first bus passed by me with my designs all over it.
These large scale print ads were on multiple large outdoor formats that ran from September 2010 to January 2011. The campaign gained 150,890,225 impressions across Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco markets. These images are from San Francisco only.
It was a lot of work and at times highly stressful, but it all made sense when putting it together. To this day, it's still my most overgrown baby. Not too shabby for an intern.
The first time I had a 'aha!' moment in respect to my artistic ability was when I was four years old and drew a spitting image of Donald Duck (pun intended, oh yes!). Later in life, I worked at Disneyland working as a portrait artist. This served as a loose fundraiser for my art schooling.
Here are 2 facts that led to my passion project: (1) San Francisco has more pets than children and (2) I absolutely love dogs. So in a stroke of brilliance at midnight, I thought — how about I commission pet portraits?
So, that's what I did for a while. Unfortunately, I am currently away from San Francisco, so this project is as well. However, you can view some past pieces on SF Pet Project's Instagram.
From crocheting to ceramics to jewelry, I frankly love making things. I accredit the knack to my ADHD and my cheapness: Oh, that's expensive, I can just make that for way cheaper. But in all honesty, all of it is for the love of living that sweet ole hobby retired lifestyle.
As a former San Francisco in house worker bee, Patty is now a nomadic freelancer. I'm a visual designer who codes a bit. I gravitate towards creative strategy, UI/UX, branding, front end coding, DIY, art and puppies.
Always have the end user in mind and talk to users to receive criticism and validation. Expand as much as possible during brainstorming and edit out all unneccesary elements afterward.
Pencil and paper, Sketch, Photoshop, Illustrator, HTML / SCSS. Is novice, but tinkers in Ruby on Rails, Github & JQuery.
