My design process is lean, user-centered and adapts to the evolving needs of the business. As a team, we embraced agile and worked in two week sprints.

As the solo product designer from August 2019 until Q1 of 2022 - working in a bootstrapped, dynamic environment, that had entered a hyper-growth phase - collaboration and integrating developers into design was how we were able to deliver a product customers consider a "best friend" and an invaluable tool.

Agile Process

Plan

UNDERSTAND

User need: a fast and streamlined communication workflow to build relationships with the media and generate coverage for their clients.

Business need: increase usage rate and user retention.

Customer-centered

I knew from our marketing and customer success teams, along with data collected in Productboard, that pitching and relationship building are primary customer goals.

Stephen & Eva - thank you for bringing in Andrew Mercier and I to provide feedback and input on the front-end media list import feature for customers. It's clear how much you both keep the customer front-and-center in the process of scoping out this feature, and I appreciate everything you're doing to make media list importing easier and more accessible for our users!

—Vanessa Neurohr, VP, Global Customer Success (Mar 25, 2022)

Empathize

I do a lot of pitching and relationship building with reporters … regularly, daily, multiple times a day.
—Marina Li, Assistant Media Executive, Earned Media at Edelman

RESEARCH

I influenced leadership and secured approval to devote time to user research via design-driven user interviews. It was important to begin delivering consolidated user insights derived from discovery and validation research via a centralized research repository.

Dovetail was the tool of choice because I love that I can tag insights and quickly find patterns in user behavior.

USER PERSONAS

Over twenty product users were interviewed and the resulting personas helped us approach user flows with a better understanding of what tasks our users were actually trying to accomplish.

Wow - for the first time ever, we now have user personas! Thanks for all your research involving interviewing our users and putting together our first set of personas.

—Lee Semel, CTO and co-founder (Apr 1, 2022)

JOBS-TO-BE-DONE

Research helped us begin to re-conceptualize what it means for users to collaborate and manage contacts in Muck Rack based on tools and sites they already know and trust. JTBD allowed us to focus on outcomes over features.

Impact: the resulting insights helped expand the scope of many features that had been planned for 2022 and beyond.

USER FLOWS

Mapping the Pitch Experience

FASTER, AUTOMATED WORKFLOWS

Current State: Manual process

Future State: Importer with possible integration

Future State: Media List Import End-to-End

Future State: Inviting teammates

Collaborate

I worked with engineering to prioritize automation and with Stephen - a wonderful product manager - to identify areas where improvements would have the most impact.

Muck Rack's main differentiator had been "white glove" customer service. This meant that many processes were highly manual and as the product scaled, we needed faster, "self-service" user workflows.

Integrating search into pitching and media list management were the two areas I determined would yield the highest impact.

A GROWING TEAM

Our product team was also growing as we onboarded three additional senior product designers, two senior level researchers, a design system specialist and a director of UX.

Big props to you, Eva, on not only the experience you designed for 2 of the pitching improvement stories we're focused on, but also how you structured your work which allowed me to easily pop into your Figma file and understand how you addressed all of the requirements. You also showed your ability to collaborate with Engineering to produce a simple, user-focused solution that can be easily built. Woo-hoo!

—Kirk Gustafson, Director, UX (Aug 26, 2022)

DESIGN WITH ENGINEERING

I was able to shift the team’s focus from a solution space to a problem space by presenting user research, gathering user data, analyzing existing user flows and communicating with the engineering team to better understand the technical landscape and identify opportunities for automation.

PROTOTYPE AND TEST

We tested real-world scenarios always concerned about usability of the final deliverable. Improvements were made based on user feedback.

Deliver

Faster, "self-service" user workflows;

Workflow integration for collaboration across teams and organizations;

Navigation updates;

A new Search API for improved efficiency;

and an improved Pitch experience that gives users more flexibility and context when curating their pitch recipient lists.

As a result, users can:

• Upload their own media lists, which were often kept in spreadsheets or in competitor platforms.
  
  

• More easily access workflows through an updated global navigation.
  
  

• Teams can now invite agency partners to become additional users within their organization increasing collaboration using a single source of truth.
  
  

• The ability to assign specific Pitch Owners to each contact within a Media List.
  
  

• Search for Media Lists, Journalists, Newsdesks, and Custom Contacts when adding recipients to a Pitch.
  
  

• Create Custom Contacts directly from the recipients table.
  
  

• Add/remove multiple Media Lists and contacts to a Pitch at once.
  
  

• View which Outlets or Media Lists recipients belong to.