Email me . lisawardux@gmail.com
Call me on my cell . 5134290925
Find me on LinkedIn . Lisa Ward
THE WORK STUFF
Manager of User Experience, First Financial Bank
April 2020 - Current
UX Leadership
• Established the first-ever User Experience team at the bank, from scratch, including job roles, responsibilities, and organizational structure with Human Resources.
• Managing a small team, consisting of design and research, in a remote and co-located environment, I’ve introduced the organization to a new discipline.
• Introducing the entire organization to UX and educating digital and stakeholders to design thinking, the needs of their users, and how the User Experience discipline can help them.
Design & Accessibility
• Supporting digital teams across the bank with pixel-perfect UI guidance, interactive design, and UX writing guidance. This included consultation and leadership around accessibility needs for our public website: www.bankatfirst.com. Using a tool called SiteImprove, and leveraging WCAG, I was able to refine jira stories that brought out first-launch of the public website into AA compliance, well within our compliance team’s comfort level.
• Coordinating, conducting, and synthesizing generative and evaluative research using diverse methods such as card sorting, virtual diary studies, surveys, interviews, and in-person workshops for both clients and bank associates to inform important business decisions for the public website and shopping experience.
Research Ops
• Formalized research ops and established a UX research repository using Confluence, working with compliance and accounting teams to define how we collect, store, and incentivize client research.
My favorite part:
Learning from the bank associates - our client service team and bankers. Seeing exactly how the associate digital experience can directly affect the client experience, both with my eyes and through analytics, is truly eye-opening.
Senior Product Designer, Paycor
September 2016 - April 2020
Data-Driven Design
I supported several teams and high-profile products including our mobile application, HR, and ‘Portal’ by:
• Moderating research using all kinds of methods like interviews, surveys, focus groups, empathy mapping, co-creation workshops, and leveraging unmoderated testing with users and stakeholders to deliver the right user at the right time. Gotta pick the right tool for the job!
• Serving my agile development teams with whatever deliverables mock-ups, interactive prototypes, or research summaries they might need to solve the problem at hand
• Facilitating workshops and design thinking exercises with product teams, stakeholders, and users to generate innovative ideas or new problems to solve!
Community
I love the part of UX that encourages connection across an entire organization. I do believe we have a duty of not only serving every user, but serving every associate.
• Participating in associate engagement activities and playing key supportive roles in Employee Resource groups (Principle 9, Colorful Connections) I am dedicated to an inclusive work environment and making sure others around me know they belong
• Actively participated in annual Hack-a-thon “Disrupt” with ever opportunity and won first place in 2018 for best client-facing innovative product idea.
My favorite part:
Getting users IN THE BUILDING and in front of the product teams writing and refining the code… I love sharing insights about users with anyone and everyone that wants to listen!
UX Designer, Jenzabar
Sept 2015 - Sept 2016
Jenzabar is a software company that serves small-mid size higher education facilities - mailing community colleges and niche universities across the United State. During my time there, I was hired to help design a product for users in a registrar’s office.
Research
Working with other talented designers, I contributed by:
• Created and tested concepts with end users on-site and at trade shows.
• Conducted field research, observation, and interviews. Facilitated user journey diagrams, and planning sessions with users to build task-based personas.
Design
I supported the organization by:
• Sharing research with key stakeholders and design architects to create shared foundational knowledge of what our users need now, and may need later.
• Creating wireframes, prototypes, and pixel-perfect design mock-ups to several agile teams to refine user stories ans sprint work.
My favorite part:
Comparing notes with my colleague after on-site observation and ideating what the future could hold.
UX Designer, Kroger
July 2013 - Sept 2015
Design
When hired at Kroger, the UX team was small. E-commerce was viewed as a ‘we should probably get to that eventually’ opportunity. Things have changed but while I was there, I contributed by:
• Supporting several product teams in Kroger’s digital transformation,’ including loyalty, coupons, weekly ad, and what was then referred to as ‘Click List. and then later ’Kroger Online Shopping’
• Creating high level, conceptual wireframes for responsive website design that demonstrate a straight-forward and intuitive e-commerce experience for users, before the holistic shopping journey they have today, existed.
• Collaborating with other UX teammates, product owners, and managers, to make tough decisions on complex user flows and dreaded edge cases. Working together to make the minimally viable more lovable.
• Collecting design patterns provided by marketing and building a design system including UI and interaction design guidelines for my internal teams.
My favorite part:
Observing users as they tested the prototypes I built from behind a glass wall and knowing, without a doubt, what worked and what didn’t.
Art Director, The J. Peterman Company
Sept 2008 - July 2013
Traditional & Graphic Design
• Conceptualizing, Copy Writing, Designing and Coding daily marketing emails.
• Creative layout for multiple print catalogs, including pre-press duties.
• Managed the contracting artists (painters), photography, and organized art for upcoming catalogs.
My favorite part was:
Brainstorming for upcoming promotions and working with other members of my team to put together amazing and effective marketing campaigns.
Freelance PlantMD, The J. Peterman Company, University of Texas and many more!
Always up for a good challenge!
- Marketing Emails, Package Design, Site Layout/UX, Promotional Landing Pages.
- HTML and CSS work for The University of Texas. Building interactive online lessons for students.
- Logos/Identities for many businesses in multiple cites.
MY FAVORITE PART
New challenges! And making something that clients and I are proud to present.
EDUCATION
Bachelor of Science in Graphic Design The Art Institute of Pittsburgh.
2002 - 2006
• Graduated top of my class & participated in many school activities, drama, haunted houses, and spoke at student orientations.
• Employed by the school as Student Activities Coordinator where I designed and distributed a weekly publication called "The Right Brain"
My favorite part: The student newspaper that I named is still called “The Right Brain” to this day.
SKILLS & HUMAN STUFF
You should know that I believe…
If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not learning. - Humility and curiosity is the greatest asset a UX practitioner can have. It’s nice being right but I’ve learned to love being wrong, too. The gray area of problems doesn’t bother me, and what’s right today can be wrong tomorrow.
People over process - We’re all human and we’re doing the best we can. Without building relationships with other people, no amount of procedures or guidelines can inspire change.
UX & Research is for everyone - This may be controversial, but I don’t believe UX is the only team that should be doing research and it’s impossible to be the only team creating experiences. It’s UX’s job to equip the dev teams, product leaders, and executives in an org to build empathy and consider the humans involved as they make decisions. We must focus on ‘leading the horse to water’ and not keeping the boat (or horse) afloat.
Mac or PC platform
Agile & SAFe Methodologies
UX Research
Wireframing
Prototyping
Marketing
Copy Writing
Traditional and Digital Illustration
HTML and CSS
Ideas and Problem Solving
APPLICATIONS
Sketch
Adobe Creative Suite
Invision
Figma
Miro
Zeplin
Jira
Microsoft TFS