http://www.brendahorowitz.com/work daily 1.0 2016-12-04 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57f7d43c59cc68731640021d/t/57fa9bc0d1758eb0546bf1b6/1476030066186/ My Portfolio Challenge After the mission statement was finalized, the next challenge for SATO Global Solutions (SGS) was to develop presentations and other materials in preparation for the company’s Grand Opening, which was only 3 weeks away! Hundreds of community and industry VIPs would be on-site for this event, along with representatives from the parent company and its other subsidiaries. SGS urgently needed accurate and informative materials to introduce the company to them, as well as to third-parties who would hear about company from press releases, media coverage, and other sources. Creating these materials was predicated on reaching agreement not only on the target markets and typical use cases, but also on the primary audience (business vs. technical) for each. A few pieces of marketing collateral already existed; however, they lacked coherency and contained technical inaccuracies and would therefore need to be rewritten from scratch. An outside firm had been contracted to code the website, and since they had already built a basic layout, the website content would need to fit into that format. Lastly, since employees would be conducting demos of the technologies in our 4 showrooms, scripts would need to be written to keep the demos within the allocated time limits and ensure they were delivered consistently. Approach My first priorities were to learn more about the company, and gain a better understanding of the target markets and users. I accomplished this in 2 ways: by collecting information from stakeholders within the company and through outside research. Prior to my official start date at SGS, I collaborated with the User Experience Architect to plan two workshops to gather information on the 4 primary industry verticals the company had decided to target for the Grand Opening. Working together, we developed and distributed a questionnaire to senior staff members. On my first day with the company, I synthesized their responses. Over the next 2 days, I facilitated team workshops to digest, discuss, and build on the results. One surprising insight was that one of the 4 proposed “verticals” was actually a “horizontal” business function that spanned multiple industries! In between the workshops, I researched our parent company, competitors, key technologies, and over 20 potential secondary industry verticals to come up to speed on the technologies and better understand our core competencies and competitive differentiators https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57f7d43c59cc68731640021d/t/57fadf7bd482e9a19e5a0917/1476058994819/ My Portfolio Challenge Citrix Workspace Services (later renamed Citrix Workspace Cloud) marked the company's entry into the nascent market for mobile workspaces. My team was initially tasked with developing the administrator and end user experiences for a scalable platform that would automate the creation and delivery of secure desktops and applications "as-a-Service" on the customer's choice of public or private cloud or hybrid datacenter infrastructure. Our goal was to accelerate the market adoption of mobile workspaces by enabling Citrix partners, enterprises, and independent software vendors to meet the needs of their administrators and end users by providing choice, versatility, extensibility, and a great user experience. Research taught us that Administrators wanted a unified platform for designing and managing Citrix solutions, quick and easy delivery of different workspaces to different groups of users, the low cost and complexity of cloud-based control, and an "evergreen" deployment model that ensured they always had the latest version. End users wanted the increased agility and productivity that come from having secure access to their hosted applications and desktops anytime, anywhere, on any device, with the high-definition experience they'd come to expect from Citrix. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57f7d43c59cc68731640021d/t/57fae0bab8a79bc648cfafb4/1476059316426/ My Portfolio Challenge The Ann Storck Center provides day and residential services to children and adults with developmental disabilities. Many of their clients use wheelchairs or require other mobility assistance, so making sure that drop-off and pick-up at the facility run smoothly and safely are prominent concerns. Due to the layout of their buildings and parking lots, the center experienced daily frustrations and even a few fender benders. As part of an overhaul of their safety and security systems, Ann Storck needed to improve traffic flow - without losing any of their limited supply of parking spaces. Approach On my first visit to the site, I focused on getting an overview of the facility and its programs, meeting some of the staff and learning about their clientele. On subsequent visits, I looked more closely at the traffic flow and parking situations, including how and when each area was being used. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57f7d43c59cc68731640021d/t/57fae191ff7c5085cbe37f29/1476059529154/ My Portfolio Challenge SATO Global Solutions (SGS) is a start-up subsidiary of SATO Holdings, a Tokyo-based global leader in automatic identification and data capture solutions. SGS develops customized solutions integrating cloud-based software with the optimal hardware, consumables, services, and support to meet each customer’s specific needs. During my interview with the company, it became apparent that key personnel had significant disagreement on the startup’s mission and focus. I offered to facilitate a discussion, and they accepted – on the spot! With that, we wrapped up my interview and immediately got to work. Approach I began by inviting each of the representatives from Corporate Communications, Marketing, Business Development, and Engineering to share his or her thoughts, as well as the rationale behind them. The information flowed, and covered not only the company’s mission, but also the markets and customers they envisioned serving and the types of products and services to offer. After drawing out everyone’s perspectives, I highlighted for the team the areas of agreement and the main points of concern. Next, I facilitated a brainstorming session, encouraging them to build on each other’s ideas. Based on the information gathered, I demonstrated possible ways to achieve common ground. Once the team agreed on the basic concepts, I proposed wording that better captured the desired connotations while avoiding the limitations of other terminology. As an added bonus, I was able to suggest options for integrating key messaging from the parent corporation. Results At the end of the 2 hour session, SGS had a draft mission statement, and I had my next job with SGS. With a few minor wording tweaks, the mission statement was finalized. Despite significant changes in the company’s primary target markets and product offerings, the mission statement remains relevant and accurate. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57f7d43c59cc68731640021d/t/57faee32d1758eb0546ec9b8/1476062762227/ My Portfolio Challenge My next assignment at SGS was to familiarize myself with additional industry verticals - to explore opportunities, recommend where the company should target its limited resources, and help develop products and solutions to meet the needs of those customers. Approach This was a research-intensive project, requiring me to gather information from both internal stakeholders and industry sources. Results Based on this research, I built out use cases and recommended strategies for monetizing and targeting the best opportunities in industries as varied as Logistics, Hospitality, Diamond & Jewelry, and Law Enforcement & Security. I began by interviewing subject matter experts from Corporate Strategy, Business Development, Marketing, Sales, and Engineering. Not surprisingly, each of them had different visions, expectations, and concerns. From their combined knowledge and insights, I learned more about our core technologies, corporate priorities, and key differentiators. In parallel, I researched what was going on in a number of potential industries, including information on their users, operating environments, key pain points, the types of solutions we could offer, and the competitive landscape. As part of that effort, I travelled to Baltimore to attend UDI conference 2015, to evaluate whether the new U.S. FDA regulations for Unique Device Identification of medical devices (and similar efforts in other countries) represented a good opportunity for SGS. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57f7d43c59cc68731640021d/t/57faf9b11b631b9a363831e2/1476065713390/ My Portfolio Challenge Keeping track of the people entering and leaving the facility is a critical function for many types of businesses. This includes hospitals, schools, research companies, military facilities, and other operations that require heightened security. Initially, SATO Global Solutions (SGS) created a simple prototype of an iPad-based Visitor Registration app to capture information as each visitor arrived at the facility. However, we soon realized that this solution would not scale well for customers with large numbers of individual visits, or for those hosting large events when hundreds of visitors would arrive within a short period of time. These use cases would require us to develop Web-based Pre-Registration and Event Registration apps. In addition, since different types of customers have different needs, we knew that all of our solutions would require not only certain standardized features, but also additional features that could be customized for each customer. The applications I worked on represent the next generation of the prototype shown in this Visitor Management Solutions video at https://youtu.be/ge5WcHVam2A. Approach The original Visitor Registration prototype was built as an iPad app with a specific customer in mind. As such, its features were tailored to the needs of that particular company and its industry. The next customer was from a different industry and had very different needs, so the prototype required significant rework to be suited for them. In order to bring a full-fledged product to market, we knew we would need to develop a more robust design that could easily be adapted to different industries, as well as different companies within the same industry. Our design would need to take into account reusability, customization, scalability, and eventual internationalization. We started by engaging a consultant, who shared key insights on visitor management, simple ideas for making facilities more secure, and ways to use visual cues (such as color-coding and dates on badges) to make it easy for everyone to know who belongs at the facility and when and where each visitor is entitled to be. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57f7d43c59cc68731640021d/t/57fafc00cd0f68a69b4ca808/1476029217937/ My Portfolio Challenge Planned as a major upgrade from Citrix App Studio 1.0, App Orchestration (AO) 2.0 was expected to provide a simple, unified way for customers to manage Citrix application and desktop delivery technologies for multiple tenants, using multiple datacenters, across multiple domains. Citrix selected AO 2.0 as the pilot project for company-wide efforts to fundamentally change the way Citrix designed, developed, and delivered its products. As a leader of the Information Experience team (part of Customer Experience), I was tasked with analyzing users’ needs and tasks at each touchpoint along the customer journey, so the project team could provide the scaffolding and experiences to support them in successfully moving to the next stage. Since Citrix was moving to an Agile development methodology, it was also crucial that we be able to deliver functional product updates every 2 weeks. Approach I reached out to Product Managers, Architects, Developers, Marketers, Sales, Readiness, Support, and Education staff to begin to understand the issues facing customers at each step of their journey. What made some continue on, while others dropped off? After gathering some initial information on the customers’ needs, challenges, and constraints, I co-facilitated a workshop where stakeholders gathered to document the current experience and brainstorm the new desired experience. At the end of the workshop, we grouped the ideas to create affinity diagrams identifying key themes. Next, I co-created storyboards to illustrate some of the challenges our customers and potential customers face, and how we envisioned AO 2.0 would help. After validating the storyboards with key stakeholders, we focused on what needed to happen at each step along the way, and what information customers needed to succeed and progress on their journeys. As part of planning the content strategy and information architecture, I led efforts to conduct a content audit, perform task analysis, and establish a unified taxonomy. The team identified who in the company was best positioned to provide each bit of assistance or information, and we assigned that person the task; at times this meant gaining cooperation from other teams. Rather than delivering all of the information in one large document like in App Studio 1.0, we divided the content for App Orchestration 2.0 in a modular fashion based on customer tasks, and then further chunked the information to make it easier for users to digest. To assist customers in finding the external content, we provided it on the same web page where they downloaded the AO 2.0 product software. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57f7d43c59cc68731640021d/t/57fafd0e29687f4dc6e098d6/1476066571216/ My Portfolio Challenge This company developed cloud-based software for small-to-midsized businesses in a niche market, and was experiencing high customer cancellation rates within the first 90 days after purchase. The large investment of employee time during the Sales and Onboarding cycles constituted a huge sunk cost for the company, while the number of dissatisfied former customers represented looming prospective costs as they shared their negative experiences with industry colleagues. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57f7d43c59cc68731640021d/t/57fafd4029687f4dc6e09a22/1476061439799/ My Portfolio Challenge One of the first things that I noticed after joining the company was that, for its size, the company received a lot of Support calls. Based on my initial investigation, I determined that multiple factors were at work: · Customers had been trained to call Support whenever they needed information. · Due to organizational silos, other options for getting information were scattered and only accessible via separate processes and delivery mechanisms. · The existing online Help was difficult to navigate and didn’t always contain the information customers needed. Even when it did, only text-based content was provided. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57f7d43c59cc68731640021d/t/57faff6d1b631b9a36385b82/1476067174359/ My Portfolio Challenge Our goal was to help customers grow their businesses and strengthen relationships with their clients by offering a drip marketing campaign feature that’s fully integrated with their management system. This project had a number of complicating factors, including: · Discovery research for this project revealed that most of our customers fell into 1 of 2 extremes: Those with no marketing experience at all, and extremely savvy marketers currently using a 3rd-party drip marketing product. The former would need a lot of hand-holding and intelligent defaults, while the latter would need help bridging their existing mental models, understanding the unique benefits of trigger-based campaigns integrated with their management system, and possibly incentives to switch to our solution. · The new feature needed to work seamlessly with existing product functionality. At the same time, it had to be architected so that our parent company’s other products could leverage the design in the future. · The UI needed to look familiar to our existing users, while also being the first step in a major effort to reskin and update the entire UI of our flagship product. Simultaneously, I was tasked with integrating the parent company’s new design standards. · The new functionality would be built on the Bootstrap front-end framework, which marked the first time any of our Developers had used Bootstrap. Approach Based on extensive user research and competitive analysis, Product Management and I identified 6 key business processes and developed intelligent workflows to automate them. These “smartflows” would enable customers to set up drip marketing campaigns that automated not only sending emails to their clients, but also scheduling follow-up tasks for their employees. After numerous rounds of ideation and testing, I crafted an end-to-end user experience for “Beginner Bob” users that provided default templates and shielded them from configuration complexity, while simultaneously giving “Savvy Sally” users the ability to completely customize templates and configure the underlying system field-value pairs that governed process automation. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57f7d43c59cc68731640021d/t/58436dc69f7456bcf3519016/1476065660979/ My Portfolio Challenge For this project, I worked on mobile and Windows applications. One enabled retail stores to better manage their inventory, while the other allowed in-store customers to get more information about the products they brought into the dressing room, request sales assistance, and receive suggestions on complimentary products (cross-sell and up-sell). The applications represent the next generation of the ones shown in the Retail Solutions video at https://youtu.be/aY78qAikxEQ. Approach I began by conducting preliminary research on current processes and pain points, visiting retail apparel stores, and talking to people in various roles in the retail industry. Next, I researched competitors’ offerings. Armed with this information, our team’s prior retail experience, and insights from our customers, the User Experience Architect and I developed Personas for 5 types of users. http://www.brendahorowitz.com/maritime daily 0.75 2016-02-29 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57f7d43c59cc68731640021d/t/57fa6a4b1b631b9a36331708/1456779355229/21.jpg Maritime http://www.brendahorowitz.com/about daily 0.75 2016-12-04 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57f7d43c59cc68731640021d/t/58436af7d482e9a1a5aa8829/1480813327855/ About Me https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57f7d43c59cc68731640021d/t/57fa7126725e25a7b5e22e96/1476030776064/ About Me https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57f7d43c59cc68731640021d/t/57fa9940bebafba899010efc/1476041029763/BrendaHorowitz.png About Me