Project Description
BACKGROUND
Mintel is a global and award-winning provider of Market Research. They deliver top-class data, market research, trends & insights to impact all type of business. I worked for them as Lead UX designer of several of their products with a particular focus on company’s flag product GNPD (Global New Products Database) used by top manufactures worldwide.
The biggest challenge I had to face was the building of a complex data analysis tool for GNPD. It was really interesting as it made me realize one of my biggest passions: data visualization!

MY MAIN RESPONSIBILITIES AS LEAD UX DESIGNER
- Carry out research including personas, user flows and goals, to support wireframes and IA.
Applied web analytics data, consumer insights, market research, and proven user-center design principles in the creation of user interface designs.
Communicate with technical teams to ensure the most efficient user experience is created, always in an Agile environment.
- Design, conduct and analyse user testing sessions.
- Advise on general UX and product design issues across the organisation.
+ Using Agile
- Daily standups
- From 5 to 20 java devs in each group.
- One or two product managers per team
- Fortnightly sprints and retros
- Distributed team: 50% London – 50% Chicago
PROCESS OVERVIEW
- Research (Who are the users? What is the product? What are the goals?)
- Documentation
- Collaborate and build relationships (users, stakeholders, devs, engineers)
- Create early low-fi designs and maintain constant communication with stakeholders (keep everyone in the loop to prevent big surprises)
- Iterate & test (user test where possible)
- Create interactive prototypes and socialise with stakeholders
- Iterate & test (user test where possible)
- Handover for implementation
- Support implementation
- Track the success of the project based on data.

USER RESEARCH PHASE
I participated and leaded the creation of user-center design processes and usability testing standards to be implemented across all company products in an agile environment: information architecture, card sorting, sitemaps, userflows and personas. I extended a culture of data-driven decisions across all the company products.

PROCESS IMPROVEMENT
I leaded and managed the creation of an online (responsive) pattern guide and toolkit to create and maintain a common style for all the company products. This generated a common style.CSS to be used across all products to make a better use of resources and maintain consistency.


To support this online pattern guide I also created (& drawn!) and managed an icon font to be implemented across all Mintel products to keep consistency and improve readability (no more pixels in retina!).
I helped several teams creating prototypes in Axure and Marvel to help product management and developers visualise intended content and interactions. I was also an advocate of workshops with users and stakeholders to improve discovery processes and get a better knowledge of our users needs.
SOME EXAMPLES OF WHAT WAS DELIVERED




