Alex cook. Product strategy. Human and data driven design.
What I’ve Done
Sedgwick - UX Designer
May 2016 - Jan. 2018
Part of a two person UX team. Sedgwick is a third party insurance claims company. Users were employees and mangers of a company who used our service. We redesigned a dashboard for employees filing Leave of Absence, Disability and Worker’s Compensation Claims. Also, we created a manger dashboard so they could approve claims and advise employees.
ORIS Intelligence & Pricespider - UX Designer
Jan. 2018 - July 2019 (Acquired) - Nov. 2020
ORIS’ product PROWL is a web crawler that informs brands where their products are being sold and if they are being sold for the Minimum Advertised Price (MAP). I was the first UX designer, so I got to build the process for UX for the team.
I redesigned the dashboard and created complex workflows that allowed users to enforce on online sellers who were in violation of their MAP agreement. Pricespider is a company that specializes in brand protection (pricing, ratings & reviews and MAP) and ‘where to buy’ for brands products.
I was lead designer for two products, PROWL (previously ORIS’ product) and Brand Monitor.
My Brand Monitor work centered on a design overhaul, requiring discovery and mockups.
With the acquisition, there was a general shift of responsibilities to account for whole platform design, including design systems and unified experiences.
Olive AI - Senior Experience Designer
Nov. 2020 - July 2022
* As you may have read, Olive AI announced a round of layoffs, and my position was eliminated. *
I worked on 6 projects at Olive, including customer-facing tools and internal tools. The customer-facing tools included a Jira ticketing application and Olive Helps , an application distribution platform (like an app store) that housed Olive made and 3rd party developed application. The internal tool I mostly managed was a GUI object detector that helped our automation team create templates for capturing information in EHRs.
All projects I worked on focused on displaying and accessing a lot of data, searching and using user flowers and validated research to inform design and product decisions. The ticketing app was a ground up design and research process. We were in the middle of a large overhaul of Olive Helps before the layoffs occurred.
While working as a senior designer, I learned a lot about stakeholder management and designing with business goals in mind.
What’s My Process
UX is a cog in a well oiled Product Machine. My job is to help with strategy, validation and visualization. I do that by following best practices I’ve learned from working with many Product teams and UX designers throughout my career.
I base my process on my values:
Advocate for the user, the product and the team
Work to be and stay on the same page
We’re all experts
Diversity of thought lead to innovation
Being professional is removing your ego from the equation
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Make sure Product, UX and Engineering are on the same page with stakeholders and expectations. I help facilitate this by hosting design workshops or thought exercises. If it’s difficult to get stakeholders in one meeting, stakeholder interviews are also helpful.
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What do we know to be true? What are we trying to prove? Where are we making assumptions? I like using user flows to document these questions and show where the holes are in our research. It helps to know how much further we need to push our research. My favorite question for Product is “What is the task?” and “What is the minimum amount of information a user needs to complete the task?”
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I make myself very accessible to my Product and Engineering teams. We are all experts working on the same team for the same goals. I rely on their experience as much as they rely on mine. I usually set up a Three Amigos (Product, Dev, QA + UX) meeting once a week to check alignment. I also seek peer review/feedback from other UX designers. Diversity of thought leads to innovation.
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I prefer to communicate milestone updates so there’s no question of where UX is at on a project. Stakeholders are very busy. It’s bought me good will by saying “I’m working the dashboard component which is 1 of 4 areas of design for this project and I intend that to be completed by end of day tomorrow.” In terms of education, if I have invited non designers to complete an exercise, I explain what and why we’re doing it so they are also able to see the overall vision and how it ties to UX.
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Advocating for your user is expected. But as a senior, I expect to be able to ask how the problem and solution ties to product or company goals. We should be able to point to our work and tie it to North Stars. As a senior designer we should advocate for users, the product and our teammates. I build relationships with my teams because good will is important to me. It helps lower barriers in communication. It’s important to be straight, honest and accountable a foundation of working relationship.
