Nicole Maron
User Experience Architect
email: nicole@technopatra.com
twitter: NicoleMaron
linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolemaron
blog: http://technopatra.com/blog
As a cross-disciplinary UX architect since 2000, I provide my clients and project partners with strategy and design work tailored to each project’s unique needs. I work collaboratively with stakeholders, researchers, visual designers, developers and users to identify goals and issues, ensuring that we provide actionable, scalable solutions that meet the best possible combination of business, technical, aesthetic, and user requirements. My goal isn’t just to design the best products, but to provide a complete system for the ongoing development and maintenance of those products.
Key Areas of Expertise
Experience Strategy
Deep understanding of business goals, user requirements, organizational workflow, usability issues, technical landscape, and brand alignment challenges is achieved through a combination of internal stakeholder interviews, user discovery, persona development, site audits, social media assessment, and features workshops. That understanding is then translated into a strategic design and development roadmap.
Information Architecture and Content Strategy
High-level site organization through a collaborative process with client partners ensures that:
- your site structure supports your business goals
- you holistically understand the dependencies and constraints across your departments to building and maintaining your product
- your content delivery both supports your organizational identity and effectively reaches your audience
Interaction Design
Definition of user tasks and use cases is the basis for developing logical, intuitive task flows, which in turn inform very detailed page-by-page element design. Interaction design requires close collaboration with visual designers and engineers to ensure elegant, feature-rich products that employ the most effective front-end technologies.
User Research
Guide your offerings to real-world customer acceptance and inform future innovation with:
- user interviews and profiling
- “guerrilla” and formal concept testing
- pre- and/or post-launch product testing
Recent Clients
FORA.tv
Deep strategy and complete UX redesign for premiere video site. Emphasis on video player, community features, and alignment with sales and marketing strategy, editorial production, and ongoing expansion.
The Women’s Foundation of California
Deep strategy work focusing on aligning the Foundation’s website and social media outreach to its defined business goals for 2009 and beyond. The Foundation is using this strategy document as a fundraising tool for the next phase of the redesign.
salesforce.com
AppExchange business software marketplace site redesign, focusing on improving the customer experience by improving navigation and personalization features; analysis and redesign of content publishing workflows; and strategic roadmap for future improvements.
Standard Deliverables (sample documentation is available upon request)
Strategy Documents
A vital first step in any project is discovery and distillation of the client’s vision, internal and product issues to be addressed, the competitive landscape, and best practices. The strategy document provides an executive summary of issues and key recommendations coupled with supporting detailed documentation as required.
User Task Flows
Whether written out in a detailed use case format or diagrammed on a whiteboard, covering the step-by-step actions a user must take to complete a desired task is fundamental to understanding the impact of a design on engineering, databases, and visual design, as well as users. These flows also become the basis for QA testing.
Navigation Briefs
These document the current site/product, expose key user path issues, and provide illustrated recommendations for improvements to navigation layout and display, offering a high-level view of the complete site/product structure.
Site Maps
These maps detail site sections and page groupings. These diagrams are key tools for high-level information architecture decision-making while in progress by providing a vitally important comprehensive perspective. Upon completion, they ensure accurate and uniform team expectations of the size and complexity of the work at hand, and supporting attentive project management for each piece, as well as the whole.
Wireframe schematics
Page-level diagrams are the most vital deliverables for site production. In progress, they offer a brainstorming palette for defining all page elements and validation rules. Upon completion, they become the blueprints from which all sides of the production team will build, making sure the entire team is literally “on the same page”.
Additional documentation as needed:
User personas, user interview scripts, design testing plans, content inventories, copy decks, user requirement documents, and more.
Previous Clients, Agencies, and Products :
FORA.tv, WebEx, salesforce.com, Marketwatch.com, Women’s Foundation of California, Hot Studio, Totem Brand Strategy, SelectQuote, University of California, National University, iShares, Tribal DDB, Razorfish/Avenue A, Liquid Agency, SFGate.com, Once Upon a School, Tibetan Organic Textiles, MyMMS, Seagate Technologies, Genentech, Classroom Connect, 3Ware, NetOptics, Avago Technologies, Safeway, InformationWeek, Burning Man, Raised Barn Press, Phoenix Pop Productions
Professional Affiliations and Education
Presently a member of:
BayCHI
Interaction Design Association (IxDA)
NetSquared
Designer’s Accord
1/97 - 3/99 San Francisco State University, Multimedia Studies Program