UX Teams: Google

Research Teams: Facebook

Building Teams: Autodesk

key accomplishments

I worked on A360 from its alpha concepting through its beta stage, into a paid product launch over 3 years. We launched great products and delivered wonderful research during this time including:

• Team growth: Growing the team from 2 (in the US) to 5 internationally. I interviewed and hired these employees, in addition to contractors and interns. My management focus was on the team and helping each team member grow to their strengths; as well as team growth with quarterly offsites and team events.

• UX Research strategy during Feature explosion: The product grew rapidly beyond a viewer. I managed the research strategy for the product, as well as coordinated the research for the entire research team. These fast-paced scrum teams often needed agile research.

• Acquisition of new international offices, new tech stacks: We grew to include offices in Hyderabad and Tel Aviv, in addition to Autodesk existing offices in Toronto, Boston, and Portland. I managed both San Francisco and Shanghai-based employees.

• Platform diversification (phone, tablet) required adoption of many new research strategies (Device Bar, Autodesk Summit), research tools (Qualtrics, UserZoom), and streamlined research processes (recruitment, incentives). I led the early adoption of UserZoom into Autodesk, as well as worked to develop reliable recruitment alternatives. I also led company wide initiatives for research at Autodesk University, the yearly mega-conference in Las Vegas.

• Growth hacking with cross-functional partnerships such as product management, senior leadership, and a nascent analytics team. 

• Check out my LinkedIn recommendations from peers and direct reports: https://www.linkedin.com/in/uxjulie 

The product

Autodesk360 is a cloud-based 2D and 3D Viewer that allows architects and engineers to share files easily. The viewer also allows real time reviewing, quick search, and storage with strong security. It is also multi-platform across mobile, desktop, and web. Crucial to these complex user scenarios it also organize data and maintains design metadata.

“Everyday collaboration for design teams.

View, share, review and find all your project data in one place.”

Autodesk also makes AutoCAD, Revit, Inventor, and many media and entertainment tools like SoftImage.

UX Evenings @ Google

As the founder of UX Evenings, I lead production and strategy for this Youtube series on the Google Design channel. This series is focused on creating a platform for senior UXers in APAC (particularly in Singapore) to share their insights live with others. Due to COVID, this series moved from a 200 person live event to a series that routinely gets 10k or more viewers per episode.

UXPA 2016

At UXPA 2016, I gave a presentation with Nika Auld about strengths based leadership and how it applies to your UX career. We were selected from many different presentation proposals and were honored to have a great group of attendees. As experienced researchers with many kinds of industries and organizations - from small consulting shops to monolithic auto manufacturers to agile startups we wanted to share what we'd learned about leadership. When we both joined FB around the same time, we came together and realized we’re both really passionate about this topic. We put together the presentation to share some of what we have learned about being an effective leader in UX, in the hopes that it can help others advance in their careers. 

ESOMAR 2015

This presentation on confronting unexpected findings in ethnographic research was shared with the international community at ESOMAR 2015 in Paris. I spoke with Shannon Danzy of Danzy Consults, along with a paper we wrote with Steve August from Revelation diary software and Tara Franz from Facebook. This presentation shared how to engage XFN teams, how to pivot when working with vendors and how to revel in the joy of exploring new areas with ethnography.

CSCW

This paper on Computer-generated Image Descriptions for Blind Users on a Social Network Service describes the usage of Facebook's new auto-generated alt-text to enhance the experience of images in the Newsfeed of blind and visually impaired users. It describes two studies conducted with blind users for both qualitative interviews and a survey of a new beta feature.

Presented in CSCW 2017: Link

CHI

This paper was the culmination of my Masters thesis called There's Always One!: Modelling outlying user performance studied the tradeoff between depth and breadth in information architecture by comparing a Bayesian model to human performance.

Link: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1358883

For CHI Indonesia, I presented a workshop in creating trusted Tester Panels in Emerging Markets. This workshop identified the benefits, limitations and pitfalls of the method, discuss and solicit the experience from other HCI researchers and practitioners in conducting research in emerging markets. Link

HCII