Widen: DAM, Portals, Workflow Product Design

When I joined Widen Enterprises (Digital Asset Management Company) as a UI designer, I quickly shifted into UX, UI, and Research. Widen was ran as a development-centered organization and they had never had UX, UI, or Research in place. During my time there, I championed research, UX, and user-centered design. Before I decided to move on, and relocate to Denver to work at Transamerica, I was leading the UX team and acting as a design scrum master.

I think of my time at Widen as a pivotal point in defining my career in complex application design. I worked on projects from ideation and discovery all the way to fully tested and validated designs that were deployed into successful projects. Additionally, I designed the app icon family, facilitated the first user tests, authored monthly UX newsletters, and helped transform Widen into a design thinking organization that worked with development instead of for development.

Impact

My time at Widen…

Portals, was my first project from discovery to development. The idea for portals was add a visual web page builder experience to Widen’s flagship digital asset management project.

Before I began, I held a number of discovery meetings with stakeholders across the company in order to understand the goals and needs from different aspects of the business. This process helped me build rapport with leadership, development, marketing, sales, and customer support. From here, the traditional design process began.

Throughout the process, I introduced many new UX standards to the organization. For example, I didn’t have funding for Sketch (so I got it), we didn’t have tools for research (so I used Powerpoint for prototyping – displayed value and received funding), collaborated on design across teams (showcased value in getting feedback at every step).

Once I had tested preliminary designs and had stakeholders onboard, Deanna (VP of Product) and I travelled across the country to get feedback from our customers. This experience was completely new to Deanna and the organization. When we arrived back to headquarters and presented our findings and experiences the entire organization began asking for more! This was an incredible experience.

Leadership

While Portals was my first project, and I was the first UI and UX designer at the company, I did grow into a leadership position. The team expanded from just me to a team of nearly ten members comprised of designers and researchers. Widen sent me to Nielsen Norman Group to gain certification in user experience and also gain knowledge into leading ux teams and the processes necessary to do so.

Double Diamond Design
Design Workshops & Collaboration
Information Architecture
Design Systems
Object-Oriented Design
On-site research and usability studies

The formation of the user experience team at Widen was an incredible learning experience and launched my career.

Here are some artifacts and prototypes from all my projects at Widen.

Mobile Axure: Document Viewership Pathways – Studying ideal pathway for viewing images and documents as well as determining primary actions.
Axure: Asset Action Component – users need quick access to download, sharing, and embed. click on the download icon when hovering over the “School of Breck” item in the second row. Axure: Creative Collaboration & Document Markup – click “view proof”, toggle views by clicking “preview” and “feedback.”
Axure: Researching search and discovery in order to give users the ability to acquire content better, faster, easier. Click – Browse, Categories, Healthcare & Medical Services, Dental & Orthodontics, Dental, filter down results by clicking “More Options.” huge project
Axure: Duplicating a webpage (portal): identifying where a user will click to duplicate, and identifying desired landing/success experience. Click more menu on “Insight Assets for Client – Generica”, then duplicate. (I was the lead on Portals – everything you see is a result of my work)