Laurel Geddes
Laurel Geddes
Product Design Manager — Laurel.Geddes@gmail.com
 

Case Studies

Contact me for a password to view in-depth case studies of projects I’ve led.

 

A prototype user experience Helps shape product vision & retains at-risk customers

An emerging growth HR-tech company’s well-being product faced challenges with inconsistent engagement, leading to customer frustration and potential churn. I designed a conceptual prototype for a blended cultural and clinical well-being experience to drive participation and improve ROI for customers. The prototype played a pivotal role in retaining at-risk customers worth $12M+. It successfully articulated the product vision, laying a solid foundation for the 18-month product roadmap.

 
 

Transforming Design Operations: Cultivating a Collaborative & User-Centric Culture

A B2B employee engagement startup faced challenges with fragmented design processes, ineffective user prioritization, and siloed communication, causing product development delays and a disjointed user experience. Implementing DesignOps methodologies streamlined processes, integrated user feedback, and fostered cross-functional collaboration, leading to increased support for UX initiatives and a shift towards a user-centric culture.

 
 

Strategic UX Enhancements Revitalize User Engagement

An enterprise employee engagement platform faced a substantial decline in user participation across its well-being programs. To address this challenge and boost user engagement while enhancing the platform's effectiveness, my team focused on implementing small, iterative UX enhancements. These improvements were designed to deliver immediate impact while also laying the groundwork for ongoing enhancements. Despite navigating significant challenges, including a major workforce reduction, our focused approach led to measurable improvements in user experience and positive business outcomes.

Navigating Complexity to Successfully Launch a New Outlier-Detection Service

Our client, a global web services company, needed help developing an intuitive experience to guide users through the intricate setup of machine learning models for their new outlier detection service. I led UX efforts from concept to launch and served as and trusted advisor to the client’s UX and engineering teams. Despite last-minute pivots and complex requirements, the team delivered on schedule.

 
 
 

Creating a Unified Admin Architecture Amid Competing Priorities and Organizational Change

A B2B SaaS startup specializing in HR-tech solutions, faced significant challenges due to a fragmented system of admin sites that led to inefficiencies in program administration, which hampered scalability, ROI clarity, and expansion to new customer segments. My team undertook a thorough investigation of the current admin ecosystem, balancing competing priorities to chart a strategic path forward. I successfully facilitated a smooth transition of design work to our new international team.

 
 
 

Project Snapshots

Highlights from projects I’ve contributed to.

 

A Day in the Life

Supporting employees by recalibrating roles

Onboarding Refresh

Communicate the value of peer coaching

User Story Mapping

Workshop facilitation to prep for a B2B portal redesign

Employee Experience

Financial institution digital workspace assessment

 
 
 

Project Overviews

Additional skills and capabilities as an individual contributor on products and user experiences

Persona Development for Loyalty Program

Client Industry: Retail
Client Revenue & Footprint: Fortune 500, International
Duration: 3 weeks

Situation

Partnered with a national toy retailer to support their best customers through a refactoring and simplification of their loyalty program.

My Role

  • Analyzed existing loyalty research and industry best practices for loyalty programs.

  • Reviewed current program capabilities and existing strategy documentation.

  • Crafted a proposed loyalty journey for 4 assumptive personas that optimizing the in-store and online experience not only for the parents, but for the children as they grow. The proposed journey transforms the experience by engaging adults and children across multiple touch-points and by focusing on providing the most value and benefit to them (“customer-first”).

results

In the current state, very little customer information is captured that could enable the company to tailor offerings or experiences to individuals or households. Coached leadership to undertake a shift in strategy from an "inside-out" perspective to an customer-first "outside-in" strategy, improving loyalty by delivering value and an improved experience to customers.

The Customer Loyalty Journey enumerates the transactional, experiential, and values-based benefits of the proposed loyalty program for both parents and their children, while also providing a narrative that addresses key customer and internal pain points.

CX_Assumptive-Personas_Page_1.png

As a children's toy retailer, it was essential to consider the preferences of both the children and their guardians.

 
 
 

‘Voice of the Customer’ Program Creation

Client Industry: Dental Insurance
Client Revenue & Footprint: Not-For-Profit, National
Duration: 3 months

Situation

We partnered with the client to build a customer insights capability to ultimately connect their customer experience to operations. Our team assessed and benchmarked the enrollee’s current experience with the client (as compared to competitors and other industries), designed a voice of the customer (VoC) program to understand and measure customer sentiments and the effectiveness of inflight initiatives, and built a model to assess the effectiveness of the VoC program and measure ROI.

My Role

  • Co-facilitated a two-day workshop with key client stakeholders to gather current pain points and develop customer journey maps. Produced poster-sized customer journey maps for each scenario (4 current state, 4 future state).

  • Synthesized input from stakeholder interviews and customer surveys to develop 3 personas and 8 scenarios for the shopping & buying and on-boarding experiences.

Results

The Voice of the Customer (VoC) capability provides customer-driven, “outside-in” insights and turns customer data into customer understanding by planning for customer feedback to flow into and through the company in ways that inform and drive action, providing a lens through which to see progress against business goals or improvements in customer experience.

 

Web Portal Redesign

Client Industry: Insurance Brokerage
Client Revenue & Footprint: Fortune 500, International

Situation

Partnered with the client team to undertake the redesign of their product by refining both the functionality offered and the technology stack supporting the current portal. We collaborated closely with the client team to define a refresh to the product and to create a product vision and implementation plan to be used for future budgetary discussions.

My Role

  • Requirements gathering. Co-facilitated client workshops and conducted interviews with key stakeholders to decipher user pain points and envision the desired future state.

  • Analyzed and synthesized user research into a persona ecosystem document that clearly delineates both MVP and MVP+ users, internal and external user roles, and user interactions with the portal and system data.

  • Created detailed personas that outlined user behaviors, interactions, needs, goals, current state pain points, user requirements, and future state needs.

  • As Lead Designer, I oversaw the redesign of the portal experience. A quick conceptual prototype was used as visual aid to garner support for the project in executive meetings. I then established the user flows and primary functionality before designing a high-fidelity clickable prototype, which was handed off for development.

Results

The final executive summary deck and high-level development plan for completing future discovery and build work was leveraged by the project sponsor in budgetary discussions.

Personas were used to guide UX design and user story development for MVP product launch, while the clickable prototypes were used by developers to guide the build. The portal redesign improves usability, improves workflow efficiency, and will ultimately increase product subscriptions by making it easier for subscribers to do business using the redesigned portal.

 

Data Modeling Application Assessment & Evolution

Client Industry: Web Services & Cloud Computing
Client Revenue & Footprint: Big 5, Worldwide

Situation

The client team requested assistance evaluating their data modeling desktop application. My colleague and I were tasked with assessing the efficacy of the existing application, its usability, and areas for feature and functional improvements.

My Role

  • Our approach was comprised of contextual inquiry (observations of users engaging with the application), qualitative feedback (from users during interview sessions), as well as market research, which included study into database management systems, data modeling, and applications for competitive systems.

  • Developed a vision statement and value proposition based on research findings to help the business determine where to focus development efforts by providing a ‘North Star.’

  • Conducted a workshop with client stakeholders to prioritize new features.

Results

We used these deliverables to work with stakeholders to determine the long-term development of the application and the evolution of the service ecosystem.

By considering the user experience holistically and preparing a foundation for expansion, we were able to minimize time spent reworking features and expedite time to release.