Aditi Joshi

I worked at NGP VAN, a progressive software company giving political candidates and NGOs a way to organize their user base and fundraise. In a company of more than 200 employees, most of whom did not interact with real customers, I found it important to give everyone a better understanding of the people who we are working for so new products and services would be designed with them in mind. I was involved in all parts of the design process, from user research to mockups to front end development so I was able to use all these skills to make a coherent set of services by truly understanding our users.

CONNECTING WITH USERS

conducting and communicating research

We completed several surveys of our user based and then picked particular customers to interview. Using this data, I created personas of typical users of our product and used those to craft user stories. Not only did we share these with our design team, but we also printed these personas on index cards, which were then hung up around team rooms in the office so that developers could be reminded of them while they were creating new products and features.

CREATING MORE USEABLE PAGES

ux design informed by research

I personally also used those personas as a basis for several interface designs, such as login screens and mobile responsive pages. These front end designs were based in best practices in the field, such as insights created from competitor research as well as co-designs with real users using techniques such as card sorting to understand the customer’s relationship to our product. It was especially important that we focused on web accessibility standards and viscous experiences that could occur within different personas so that we were using our research to inform these designs.