US News and World Report
While working at US News and Worlds Report, I was involved in a few departments of the business. I worked on the Autos team and the Travel team. As a web designer/UX designer at the company, my responsibility was to help assist the Autos team and Travel Team with designing new projects and user research. We also would help assist the product manager and the development team on how we can use our new design system, to build better features for our website. Our design system was based on the atomic system from Brad Frost. Our design system would also mirror the repository of react components that the developers would use to build the page, so everyone could be on the same page.We would then take the pages that were in the old design and redesign them in our new styles and using the design system. On the right is an example of a page I redesigned using our design system.
Task
An example project I worked on, while I was on the Travel team for US News and World Report. My product manager wanted to implement a new feature on our hotel ranking page, which shows the different hotels people can book. But at that time when you clicked on an Hotel information card, it will take you to the Hotel Profile page with more information. Instead of doing that he wanted our user to have the ability to hit a drop down, which would expand the info cards, and show more information about the hotels. Our process was first to look at our competitors, and they were doing the same as well and had similar features we wanted to implement. After we did that we created a quick mock of what it could look like. With the mocks in hand we did user interviews and showed our users the mocks and got their thoughts. Once we got feedback from our users were able to implement updates to the original mocks. After we completed the updates to the mocks we got them approved by all the stakeholders and we have what we call a carve up meeting with the developers. I put together an Jira ticket for the developers, so they can reference all the components and details about the new feature we are going to implement. After the design was developed we did testing through Optimizely, and when we got good results we published it to the website. Once that happened we immediately saw an increase in users clicking on the cards to get more information and booking more hotels from our website. https://travel.usnews.com/Hotels/USA/
