A strategic mindset for creating efficiency and excellence at The Weather Company.
As Sr. UX Researcher then Senior Manager, Consumer Insights, I worked tirelessly to improve user experiences in The Weather Channel apps and websites. I leveraged my UX Research and Design experience to encourage excellence and enhance efficiencies by supplying research data and by championing industry best-practices for user-centered design.
Customer Journey Map
Problem: Finding the intersection between customer needs and business needs is essential for product teams to work toward realistic, successful, and sustained goals. We sought to create a unified view of our audience across marketing, product design, and advertising.
Solution: Under my lead, and working with Consumer Product and Marketing, we created a Customer Journey Map to clearly identify customer and business goals for each stage in the journey. The audience groups were developed based upon Consumer Product research, and Ads Research.
Results: The effort helped Leadership, Product Management, Marketing, and Design as they quantified quarterly metrics and targets for each audience type.
Detail available upon request.
Research-based User Stories for Agile Design and Development
Problem: The Weather Company is a science-based, informational source of daily weather information. The task of designing efficient and satisfying experiences for an audience of 400MM monthly active users is daunting. Every user has a different set of needs based upon lifestyle, time of day, weather situation, and weather interest.
Solution: To aid in designing less general, and more targeted experiences, I created a framework for writing user stories that is grounded in research, e.g. “As an outdoor enthusiast, I’d like to know what the weekend’s weather will be so I can make a plan to get outdoors.”
As source material, I referenced ads research for target audience groups (e.g. Parents, Commuters), UX research on Jobs-to-be-Done, (“Will it rain during my commute today?”), and weather science information to identify mitigating circumstances. I built the framework in Mural, then socialized it within the Consumer Product, Design, and Development teams.
Results: The effort was just one example of how I drove for excellence and efficiency by providing research data and methodologies that are grounded in industry best-practices for user-centered design, which informed uncounted enhancements to The Weather Channel Apps and Websites.
Detail available upon request.
Democratizing user research within The Weather Company
Problem: Our very small research team supported a large organization with a wide variety of research needs related to product strategy, design, advertising, marketing, editorial content, business strategy and more.
Solution: In order to leverage the powerful remote user research capabilities we had in-house, I wrote training materials and templates in UserZoom, so that product managers and designers could conduct their own research with moderate assist from the research team.
Results: The efforts resulted in more research tests being run by non-researchers, and a wider and stronger understanding of user research, and how to plan and execute it. Ultimately, more applied research resulted in improved user experiences, and greater confidence in design and product decision making.