Christina Taggart

AwesomeBox

I wear many hats for this small startup. Coding in JavaScript, Ruby, HTML & CSS. Helping to launch the kickstarter campaign that brought in our first users. Tackling business goals such as increasing traction through user centered design. Establishing our company's user experience framework with the goal of optimizing our product's end to end user experience. Conducting user research and transforming learnings into designs, code specs, and agile sprints. Leading the remote dev team, collaborating regularly with the CEO and Head of Marketing to set priorities, and managing task execution through daily scrums and lean methodologies.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Users did not want to login with Facebook; I prototyped an email login flow that dramatically increases product accessibility. Users were confused about what an awesome box is; I created a new homepage that increased clarity and visitor-to-customer conversions. Users were abandoning the app during box setup, card creation, and sending invitations; I streamlined these main user touch points, improving bounce rates.

UX Designer
Full Stack Developer
2014 - 2015

User Centered Design

My first step in designing creative solutions is to turn to our users. As a team we've established our main personas, business goals, and company brand. When I oversee new feature development or the enhancement of existing user flows, I keep these in mind and begin user research. To identify current user needs I conduct: usability testing, user interviews, user feedback surveys, synthesize customer service requests, ab test, and interpret google analytics usage data.

Priority & Task Management

With limited resources and a seemingly neverending task list, I must frequently discern which tasks need to happen today, this week, this month, or even this year. I tee up issues for team discussion, manage expectations, plan milestones, and organize tasks into priority order based on time-per-task estimates, user needs, and business goals. We use github for task management, measuring progress over time, generating more realistic time estimates for coding tasks, and to manage developers working remotely.

Design & Wireframe

Flare and focus; first, I rapidly design as many diverse solutions as possible in a short period of time. Then I hone in and iterate on a few ideas that are most viable and in line with the longer term product vision. I use paper sketching, balsamiq, and photoshop to visually communicate abstract design solutions to the team.

Low Fidelity Prototype

Before investing time and resources in coding a new feature, I want to make sure it will have a meaningful impact on users. To quickly witness a new feature in action, and see real reactions from real users, I create low fidelity prototypes with paper or whiteboarding to weed out basic usability issues and identify potential code architecture challenges.

High Fidelity Prototype

I use tools like InVision to transform static wireframes into prototypes used for laying out specs for new features. These interactive user flows bring shared understanding to the team of the big picture task at hand as well as the nitty gritty details required for code implementation. User testing the prototype uncovers usability issues and validates design solutions.

Code Development

Whether its implementing new features, enhancements, bug fixing, refactoring, or QA, a top priority in coding is to benefit the product and overall user experience. To 'put out fires' I problem solve to find quick fixes that give me time to implement longer term, more robust solutions. Through 7th generation thinking I make code more modular, documented, or easier for future developers to work with. Through good code, I've made the product easier to use, more intuitive, and more reliable.