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.