UX Strategy at Elevated Third

During a quick stint at the end of 2022, it was the month of November. I responded to a job post for UX Strategist at Elevated Third. Since, I had been a UX Strategist two years prior at Theory, I felt qualified to perform the task.

Elevated Third is a drupal agency based in Denver CO. They were experiencing unexpecte growth towards Q4 of 2022 in which they sought to hire a UX Strategist full-time. I was brought on as a contractor or 30 days while their senior UX Strategist was on her honey moon.

During this time, I worked on a few projects in the finance, healthcare, and insurance industries. The duties I performed were in lockstep with the Director of UX. They included:

Wireframing
Presentation Decks
Prototyping
Stakeholder Presentation
Discovery Facilitation
Card Sorting
UX Research
Competitor Research
UX Audits

I delivered a micro-site to drupal developers for healthcare. Helped reorient stakeholders to end-user data for insurance, and slow the hurry sickness of a fast paced team in finance.

Here's their case studies:

With a mandate from upper level management, two team leads at Spartanburg were outsourcing a microsite to E3. On this project, I heard them out, asked questions, and delivered wireframes, and hi-fidelity mockups in the form of mobile, tablet, and laptop prototypes. During this time, I also mentored a junior designer on the E3 team. I created a mini design system, using components, autoflow, and variants for the client. In addition I provided video walkthroughs and presentations to internal stakeholder review.

With Drupal 7 going on the rocks in Nov 2023, GNY was getting ahead of the sunsetting of their website's codebase. With this in mind, the team yearned to make some much needed usability adjustments to the broker portal, which was their most prized user persona. Additionally, they wanted the marketing website to be ported over. After a thorough competitor research my analysis gave way to exposing the information architecture in the navigation was defying Jakob's Law. The sheer number of hierarchical navigations inhibited usability in theory. Just to be sure I recommended user interviews, and usability testing to follow up on the suggested information architecture's usability.

With a new credit card offering coming out in Q1 of 2023, Credit Union of Colorado's team had a lot of projects on the grill. Using the Socratic Method I was able to discern that their were contradictory objectives the team was attempting to meet.

Past credit card campaigns did not equate to new checking accounts being opened.
New checking accounts was the main KPI of the team.

When a team has a separate objective KPI than its tactic it's important to slow down and reframe the strategy to reach alignment. This helps save a lot of money, and increase ROI of UX Strategy and subsequent processes.

Selected Works