Neustar (2014-2016)
Director of UX
I was the Director of UX of the Neustar UX (NUX) Studio. The NUX Studio was in internal design consultancy for Neustar's diverse product groups: Marketing Analytics, IT Safety and Security, UltraViolet, among others. We also maintained an extensive UI pattern library and usage guidelines called the NUX Toolkit. The Toolkit covered common UI elements like buttons and navigation controls, as well as branding, color palettes, and data visualizations.
Project Blueprint
In 2014, Neustar launched a major initiative to consolidate and coordinate a group of disparate companies and technologies they had acquired over the course of a few years. This consolidated experience was envisioned as a Bloomberg terminal for marketing analytics.
Below are some key artifacts of this work and two PDF downloads. These represent my initial thoughts on the project and were used to promote discussion and build consensus. A large portion of these concepts made their way into the product experience.
Project Blueprint Downloads
Means and Ends
Project Blueprint was an exploration of how a unified experience might be architected: creating a platform that would marry several products, knit them into a single cohesive workflow and adapt to the needs of different user types and roles.
This wire illustrates a new user to the system who was in a junior position and tactically tasked. It's components are broken down and described in detail below.
Task Bar
The task bar portion of the page would house actions targeted to the user role. Over time, it would learn what actions the user commonly invoked and present those as well.
This view was geared towards new users. The task bar could be hidden if the user no longer had need for it.
Patterns in the Data
Central to this experience was the monitoring the performance of ad campaigns: impressions, CTR, actions, and spend across different channels and time periods. Using this data the user could select to move spend to another channel, or to fine tune the audience for better results.
Intelligent Coaching
We designed our experience to be able to recommend next steps based on system/user status. The thought here was to elevate the passive, user-maintained 'to-do' list into an intelligently curated 'next steps' based on workflow progress, state of campaigns, and opportunities for campaign improvement identified by optimization algorithms.
Mental Models
The original experience was broken into functions and then objects. What we found was that most users wanted to step into an object space (e.g., an ad campaign or audience they'd built) and then into functions (editing, monitoring).
Adjectives
A detail of how to think about data (adjectives). These abstractions helped direct and focus conversations between key stakeholders.
Role Model
One of the key goals of PlatformOne was to be able to serve different roles from a common interface. An experience could differ across a complex workflow (left to right) but also the view into that workflow could change depending on role (from Jr. analysts to CMOs, from the tactical to the purely strategic.)
There was a massive amount of work that was completed while I was at Neustar. Many of the services were complex and leveraged niche concepts and lexicons.
I urge you to download the two PDFs at the top of this page for more detail on my thinking and project aims. The materials here barely scratch the surface of the thinking and design (and sheer number of products and projects supported) that went on in those two years.