Why this project?
This project doesn’t have ground-breaking technology involved, nor does it showcase shiny visual design skills. However, this is one my favorite projects at Poll Everywhere because of the challenges involved along the way.
The small PowerPoint team had an appetite for design. Unfortunately, our engineers were remote and we had a shortage of designers on hand. This meant that engineers didn't always have a designer paired up with them at all times.
When I was placed on the project, we decided to do user research, giving the engineers a foundation of user empathy that would persist beyond the current project.
I am most proud of the process I built around the project. Setting the pace and tone for the research, checking in with stakeholders, and making sure our PM and engineers were involved in the process was critical to its success.
My motivation was not only to facilitate more user empathy and better team collaboration, but the trends we were seeing contradicted our stakeholders' expectations. Because of this, their involvement throughout the process was necessary for me to justify my design decisions. It felt great to see the team have each others' back and defend the research and it felt like a true team effort.