What I did
My time at Spectora was a mix of building, teaching, shipping, and planning for growth. The product team embraced design early, and the collaboration that followed was some of the best of my career. I’m incredibly proud of what we accomplished together. Here are a few highlights from that work.
1: Introduced Process
The principle PM had created a chart for their workflow shortly before my arrival. I added the design layer on to help align the team on how we could best work together. I worked with the PM’s to refine this process. This was a helpful tool for getting product and design on the same page.
Prior to me joining Spectora there was only one page dedicated brand and no other design documentation. In production we had significant inconsistencies between colors, fonts, patterns and interactions. I started by taking inventory of what we had and looking for the least disruptive way to unify elements. This early work became the foundation for the design system.
Later we brought on more designers and that’s when thing really started to take off. Within a year or so we had complex components that were well built in Figma and closely in parity with Storybook. What started as me alone in Figma turned into a full team effort.
Shoutout to Russ, Ian (Design) & Suely (UXE).
Previous Client Portal
Admin side
3: Assembled team
One of the highlights of my time at Spectora was hiring and growing a team of three talented designers. I built the team deliberately, with Spectora's long-term needs in mind, seeking talented generalists with depth in either research or design systems. I hired carefully, weighing both skillset and cultural fit. Above all, I believe deeply in psychological safety, and made it a priority to nurture a team dynamic where everyone could do their best work.
4: Future state vision
Kill Frank was the code name for this multi-pronged approach to address UX debt and modernize the platform. This was a bit of a passion project of mine to help us get the most out of our limited resources. Plus, we were just about to staff up our design team I wanted to make sure the team was set up for success by having consistent elements and north star to work towards.
Kill Frank Included
Source of truth for Colors, fonts, and basic patterns. This was contained in the design system.
UX standards and guidelines - This set of rules was meant to align the product team and save time. It began defining things like Icon usage, saving rules, progressive disclosure, alerts and notifications.
Site Architecture- Years of tacking on features had left Spectora disjointed. I created an updated sitemap to logically group items together. We validated this both internally and externally.
Site Scaffolding- I created a high level layout for all major section of the desktop platform. This greatly helped find commonalities across section. The design team used this as a starting spot, not a final solution. Each designer was empowered to push beyond the first looks. I really want all of us designers to consider the broader platform before diving deep on our respective projects.
Key Flows - Since this was vision work, I used this opportunity to design a few key flows that could be greatly improved through design. This included adding/updating a staff member, managing templates & untangling company settings from personal settings.
5: IC Projects
When I wasn’t working on strategy, coaching, planning & teaching I was working on individual contributor projects. I supported a few different pods, both generally focused on growth.
Spectora Onboarding V1 & V2.
Product upsell & Education
Pricing pages design strategy
