User Experience Design Manager
In 2008 Boeing purchased Skarven Enterprises along with her sister company Kestrel Enterprises. At this point, I was tasked with creating a UXD team. The team had a similar set of responsibilities to those I handled on my own at Skarven but now we could do quite a bit more. Each team member working directly on agile development teams to do UI design, CBT, and other documentation tasks. I encouraged a balance between working with the development teams and working as a team of design specialists to get the best designs possible. The team was never very large, six at most, but the work we produced was remarkable.
Below are some of the design projects produced by this extraordinary team.
A major UI re-design
Certainly the highlight of my time as a team lead. Several new features, workflow improvements, and aesthetic revisions were added to the 7.6 version of TAC. My UXD team provided…
- User testing to determine the most critical needs, successes and failures all along the way.
- Design sessions open to all stakeholders in the various projects that lead to designs that the customer representatives liked, the engineers were confident they could develop, and the executives felt they could sell.
- Design implementation by pairing with developers to ensure that iteration in the development cycle always improved the plan.
- More user testing to gather feedback on the results of the release.
- Promotional materials including the poster to the left and the video below which were created entirely in-house to get analysts excited about the launch of the new capability.
The TAC Help Center Design
My team and I designed the TAC Help Center. The help center consisted of
- A reference guide
- A How To section
- A guide to Pattern Specification Language
- An FAQ section
- A glossary
- A PDF for a printed Quick Reference Guide
- Computer based training with exams
- An Introduction to Analysis Course
Click here to check it out.
TAC Computer Based Training
A particular source of pride is the computer based training modules created and maintained by my UXD team. We made every effort to provide an engaging learning experience for the users so they could get the most out of the application.
Click here to take some TAC training (You’ll need to enable your Flash player).
It’s worth noting that the involvement of the UXD team in creation of the eLearning materials led to highly informed design improvements, as documentation is a great source of UX testing.
The Kestrel Enterprises web site
Branding our group was an unusual proposition because we were a fully integrated business unit within Boeing. Normally, such a business would hand over their identity to Boeing Communications but our business had comfortable relationship with our clients and it was decided that we should maintain our own brand for the time being.
Some logo work done with, and by, my team.
