I hired Karen as an independent contractor to research and design a brand new reporting, monitoring, and alerting experience for Chrome enterprise/education customers. Karen is phenomenal to work with across the board, but what stood out most to me was:
- Her initiative in bringing structure to the problem space and solving it. I gave Karen the basic “why” for our project (customer feedback on reporting) but she brought the methodology for deeply understanding the space and the raw skills in research, design, and interaction architecture to guide the project to completion. From segmenting customers to building personas to validating/disproving our theories and her designs with research, Karen gave life to the project and created a compelling vision for the product we should build. She did all of this independently while working remotely.
- The sheer quantity of the artifacts she produces. Karen not only solved the problem she set out to solve, she also connected the dots to multiple other areas of our product to make sure the overall customer experience was cohesive. For example, although we had initially envisioned the output as a product design, Karen also learned early from the customer research that API access was equally important, so Karen designed an innovative feature to help novice users learn the API (and it ended up testing just as well with advanced users). Karen is a product & UX machine who will leave no idea undeveloped and no concept untested. I was just as pleased with the negative findings (e.g. customers actually don’t care about X) as with the many positive findings, because the data from the research gives us confidence that we’re focused on the right features.
- Her eagerness to spread her expertise to the rest of the organization. By the end of Karen’s contract, she had not only completed her part of the project, she had set up the organization around her to build the product successfully. Through a couple of important training and mentorship opportunities on the team, she spread both a culture and a methodology of making strongly-reasoned well-vetted product & UX decisions. This will continue to pay dividends for the team far into the future.
Overall I *enthusiastically* recommend Karen and hope to work more with her in the future!