Design process

At Fidelity, I worked with Agile teams, Stage Gate teams, Six Sigma heads, and plenty of other waterfall folks — and very few of them had much room in their process or their hearts for the user experience. Thus, we found ourselves in the position of needing to create and add our own UX process as an overlay to any process we might encounter.

Our process centered around three checkpoints in the design workstream, including three signoff meetings. The first, the Design Review A (DR A), was conducted when the team had defined business goals, metrics, user scenarios, a usability evaluation plan, a direction for the overall organization scheme and content strategy for the project. The second, the DR B, was held when the team had settled on and user-tested the final design, and the third, the DR C, was held on the final screens just before QA testing, and was a check to see that what had been built was what we had designed.

Fidelity’s IA process and deliverables

I may well have been the first person at Fidelity to have the title of Information Architect, though there were many of us doing all or parts of the job before. Through many meetings with my colleagues Michael Kazenel, Melinda Scrime, and Patrick Noble, I defined and described the basic deliverable set for IAs at Fidelity.

Design process, 2000 – present

Style guide process

When I created my job as the Style Guardian, I devised how the style guide would be implemented as well as its content and structure. This presentation describes our approach to consistency and reuse and how we ensured it across our product suite.

Style guide process, 2001 – 2006

Quick Design process: a case study

The redesigning of Fidelity.com’s account opening process has taken up to ten months in the past. This presentation shows how I led a team of three people in reskinning and improving the UK’s account opening process in merely eight days.

Rapid design case study, July 2008