Harmony

Harmony is Colonial Life’s award winning enterprise enrollment system.  It has online components written in .Net and offline components in WPF and Silverlight. As user experience team leader, I was responsible for the UX and creative strategy,  information architecture, visual design and front-end web development.

• Harmony Online (2003 – 3006)
• Harmony Offline (2006 – 2008)
• Harmony Setup (2003 – 2008)
• Harmony Prelude (2010)
• Suite of Enrollment Services (2005) - Tongue and cheek site marketing “new” enrollment capabilities to Colonial Life’s agents.

My Colonial Life

My Colonial Life is the umbrella Policy Holder site for Colonial Life. HTML5, CSS3, JQuery, SOA, CMS

• Policyholder Site (2009 – 2010)
• Producer Site Coming soon (2010-2012)

CSC Work (Password Protected)

• Agency Link (2007)
• WiKonnecT/ (2008)

HTML5 sites

• Stilllife in America (2011) - Interactive Experience using Javascript & SVG
• Broker Revenue (2011) - A marketing site designed to help build broker sales. HTML5, CSS3, JQuery with responsive layout.
• CMS Templates for the University (2012) - Alpha templates that are designed for OmniUpdate CMS. HTML5, CSS3, JQuery with responsive layout.

Non-Profit Sites

• Here is New York (2001-2003)
• Do You Know What it Means (2005)

Writing Sample & Strategy Document (Password Protected)

• Colonial Life Creative Brief (2006) - This document should serve both as a writing sample and to indicate my thinking about brands and brand strategy.
• My Colonial Life Business Case (2010) - This document shows a successful business case that has spawned a multi-year corporate project to redevelop all of colonial Life’s extranets.

Wireframes (Password Protected)

• Wireframes (random sampling-more available upon request)

As I have been thinking of the problem I had a realization. Estimating is a problem.

Assumptions:

• If a range of time is given for a project, the project will not be completed until the far end of that range has been reached.  E.g. If I say the project will take 4 to 6 months, then the project will most likely take 6 months.
• When asked to estimate, it is human nature to give higher estimates than the actual time it will take to complete. This is particularly true if there are issues with missing your estimates. E.g. If a task takes one day, we  estimate its completion at two days.

Colonial Life’s Policyholder site had not been updated significantly since 1998 and it was greatly in need of a visual redesign, new functionality, better user experience and a technology upgrade. The new site incorporates Sitecore’s CMS, HTML5/CSS3, SOA services and a lot of .NET. It’s easy to maintain due to the technology platform we developed, it contains workflows so business areas can author their own content, but its our customers who benefit the most. The site is easy to use: you can access your policies or claims with just a few clicks. If the customer still has trouble, we created context sensitive FAQs and tips. The new look is friendly and happy, changing how our customers feel when they interact with the company.

• Managed the team responsible for the site
• Creative Director for the project
• Created the initial site architecture and wireframes

The interactive experience of the Still Life in America project is an ongoing collaboration between me and my father. Over the years, it has had multiple incarnations the most recent is concurrently being exhibited it China and New York.

Still Life in America 2 HTML5 Version

Still Life in America 1 Flash Version

UX designers need to understand what the business needs and environment within which they are working. In fact, UX designers need to gain a deep insight into all the aspects of the business that can ultimately impact the experience. If you craft a great experience, but it can’t be maintained, runs too slow, or isn’t relevant, what good is it? How many of you have gone back to a site you designed and cringed.

I think it’s also important to consider technology as an equal partner to business and user experience. This is especially true when designing within a large enterprise. What does the business need, what does the user want to do, and what is the best approach to achieve the aforementioned goals in a reasonable timeframe? How buildable is it?

While I believe it’s true that UX designers can lose their way, so too can the business. When a business focuses too heavily on the bottom line, often they forget that they exist to provide value to customers. When a business is healthy and well managed, its goals should not be too different than those of the UX designer. Provide value to your customers and users.

The process of creating rate-sheets for Agents to give to Employers and Brokers was tedious, time consuming and ran the risk of being out of compliance. I was asked to design an tool that developers could build, agents could use and customers could understand. By working closely with a tight-knit team, I was able to design an approach that would leverage quote screens out of Harmony (our existing enrollment system) which dramatically lessened the work and made for a very maintainable system. The system was built with WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), XAML and FO.NET. The tools allows you to quote a product, save the quote in a collection, order the quotes and the collection by drag and drop. While developing the tool, I saw opportunities to expand Prelude’s usefulness with very little extra work. One way to do this was to create an on screen quick quote and the other was to be able to create a quote-sheet so that an employee would be able to save the quote or share it with a spouse.

• Business owner for the application
• Created the architecture and wireframes
• Creative Directed the project
• Implemented the XAML

1. Create relationships. Be bold, introduce yourself and make connections. Get one person to connect you to another person. Anything you accomplish will be easier if you have a good network.

2. Learn. It’s imperative that you understand what is going on, and quick. Ask questions, get documentation, and read read read. Remember school? What worked then should work now.

3. Get data. Your decisions are made best with data. Go back to your connections or make new ones, but you are going to need data to make your decisions and then to justify them.

4: Partner. Build a team or find one… you can’t do it all yourself. Make sure they have passion; and make sure you have passion.

5. Define. Now you have to make a different kind of connection: between what your learned about the business and what you learned from your data. Define the problem you are going to solve. And if you can tie it to financials, all the better.

6. Plan. Make one.

7: Compare. That’s right, see what others are doing, this is probably not the first time this problem has been solved.

8. Architect. Break it down to its smallest pieces and build up. All good systems start out simple.

9. Design. When you think you are done, you’ve probably just started.

10: Rinse and repeat. Seriously. Go back to step one. Make some new friends. Then learn something new. Get the latest data. Double check the problem. You get the idea.

11: Validate. Make sure you got it right. Test it. Then test it again.

12: Build. And improve. It shouldn’t look like your design, it should look better than your design. Things should get better during the process of construction, not worse.

12. Maintain.