Mobile Design & Research

Mobile design

Led mobile design for Android and iOS alongside the desktop Slack products for the past five years. From definition to delivery, I've shipped countless features and have built out the product side of mobile at Slack and helped define best practices within Design, Engineering, User Research, and Accessibility teams. I also created and presented a number of educational efforts for mobile platforms including crash courses, peer review, and documentation.

Usability testing

Years before we had a Research team at Slack, I started the first grassroots usability sessions out of the Vancouver office to observe customer interactions with our mobile products. Since then I've run device and platform specific sessions, internally and externally with live builds and prototypes to uncover complexities and new feature opportunities.

User research

From a team of 40+ product designers, I was selected for the "emerging markets" research trip in Brazil. The week consisted of non-stop customer visits to observe Slack usage on site, running one-on-one sessions with teams to better understand their pain points and needs, and round table usability sessions in the evenings. I was responsible for documenting cultural opportunities and device specific needs, as well as creating a presentation for road map possibilities. I also collected regional market reports and stats to define device specifics for our target market platforms.

Prototyping & animation

As the mobile design representative at Slack, I'm constantly trying to better our understanding of mobile-specific use cases. I've used countless prototyping tools in order to recommend the fastest and most flexible software for us to stress test our ideas. I also host office hours to help our team design and build out interactions for pillar-specific features. The prototypes range anywhere from short videos to define animation paths, to complex interactive flows.

Briefs, specs, & project planning

Beyond pixels, I've led small scale hack day teams to large scale pillar teams with road map definition and briefs, success criteria, groomed backlogs, feature specs, and kick-off planning. Most recently I've been responsible for owning and defining the initiatives and OKRs for the Native Clients team.

Slack Kit

The first three years of Slack were a crazy whirlwind of growth, so a defined and documented library of all our mobile platform components came out of necessity. I designed, reviewed, and grew our feature set across iOS and Android in parallel with every new desktop feature that rolled out, which resulted in the creation of a reusable library of assets that were accessible to our mobile engineers. Fast forward to today, "Slack Kit" has grown wall to wall within the company and builds out stress-tested components with responsiveness and accessibility baked in, across every platform.

App maps & user journeys

Created all the internal resources for our mobile app maps and flows, and partnered with a few other designers and researchers to define our mobile use cases. Defined mobile user journeys for onboarding, progressive educational flows, and feature discovery.

Localization

Mocked up and built out responsive components for internal feature development and external marketing in English, Japanese, French, German and Spanish across MacOS, Windows, Linux, Chromebook, iOS, Android and Winphone.

Accessibility & offline

As the mobile lead, I've defined extensive voice over maps and usability patterns for iOS and Android accessibility modes for all our major features and flows. One of the biggest challenges (and opportunities) is for us to embrace mobile capabilities in all kinds of working environments, so much of this work is exploring new use cases and how to tie into the existing platform tools to create a better Slack experience.

Tracking & metrics

I define basic feature tracking beacons, interactive thresholds, and logic for success criteria across the mobile platforms. I also monitor existing data and dashboards to determine trends and uncover insights for product opportunities within my own work as well as other product teams.