Co-leading the immensely talented UX team at CSX empowered me to grow into an effective mentor, strategist and business partner. As we juggled redesign projects for 20+ year-old, legacy applications and some new solution initiatives as well, the time had come to push for adoption of web analytics, engage more regularly with users and partner even more closely with the business to deliver delightful, highly usable digital solutions.
Role: Project Lead (various modules), Information Architect, Strategist & Researcher
Skills Used:
Team Leadership, Mentorship, User Research, UX Strategy, Cross-Functional Collaboration, Public Speaking, Facilitation, Data Synthesis, Data Storytelling, Presentation Design, UI Design, Design QA, Usability Audit & Analysis
ShipCSX is the customer-facing operational suite of online tools for rail customers to place orders for cars, unit trains, trace and track their shipments, manage reservations, pay for services and more. With around 40 unique functional applications and even more features in each, the rewrite project was a large, legnthy and costly undertaking - but we knew it would pay dividends if we collaborated well and planned & worked strategically. I am proud to say that, during my time on the UX team, we achieved this - striking healthy balance between serving and anticipating user needs and clearing away tech debt for optimal scalability and maintenance.
Working as a collaborator on research and strategy, we gained buy-in from company leadership and business partners to recruit and conduct research with the large user base, enabling us to create updated user personas, segment them appropriately and begin gathering qualitative user insights in regular cadence.
Using what we learned from users and other stakeholders and distilled through collaborative activities like affinity diagramming, we were able to produce journey maps, service blueprints and storyboards to cultivate user empathy and help drive solution strategy and priorities.
We hypothesized, validated and redefined existing global elements of ShipCSX's information architecture and collaborated again to strategize and ideate how to iteratively deliver the improved modules in the collective ShipCSX environment, yet offer a cohesive, intuitive experience for users.
I was able to validate and bring business attention to the need for strong user support offerings, especially during the transition period. Based on qualitative user insights gathered during interviews and workflow observations, I mocked up and pitched concepts to enhance usability and access to support documentation, as a part of the end-to-end ShipCSX user experience.
Serving as UX lead for the Inventory Management module, I assembled my design trio and we got to work digesting documentation, conducting stakeholder interviews, auditing the existing experience and documenting initial findings, ranked by severity of heuristic violations. Pairing these findings with attitudinal insights and deeper understanding of user goals and needs within their specific companies and teams added valuable dimension to our research reports and recommendations.
As we continued to work iteratively on small features, I also worked with other senior UXers to evangelize to the organization about the value of strong behavioral analytics. Achieving buy-in was an amazing win for not only our team, but the organization at large, allowing better measurement of our solutions' ROI and equipping us with helpful feedback to drive process improvement and measurement of successful collaboration between our teams.