Context & Challenge

Point Inside provides indoor location services for retailers, airports, malls, and other large venues.

When I joined as their first full-time designer, the company faced:

• Outdated and inconsistent product UI
• Confusing user experiences for both B2B and consumer apps
• No formal design process or research practice
• Misaligned stakeholders and unclear understanding of the customer

My Role

• Design Leadership: Established UX as a strategic function; grew team from 1 → 3 designers
• Research & Strategy: Created personas, ran usability testing, and conducted a multi-modal shopping field study
• Hands-On Design: Led end-to-end redesigns for mobile, web, dashboards, maps, and marketing
• Brand Stewardship: Directed rebrand, trade show booth, marketing website, and sales collateral

9 years of company history without a designer was taking its toll on the business. I fixed it.

When I started at Point Inside as their first designer, the company's design maturity was low and resulted in poor user experiences across their products. Their brand ing was haphazard, design across the board was outdated and inconsistent. Poor user experiences of their digital products left users confused, sales presentations lacked polish and frustrated the sales team, and decision makers had diverging ideas about who the customers were and what they needed. The lack of a formal (or any) design and user experience practice impacted the business.

During my tenure, I elevated the role of design to a level that was at least close to design driven. I also overhauled the design of everything they did and turned design into an asset to the business that would allow Point Inside to leverage their user experience as a competitive advantage.

I combined a holistic apprach and a broad range of UX strategy, research, and design methods to uplevel Point Inside's UX Maturity

Strategy & Research

• I leveraged the teams knowledge to captured institutional knowledge about customers.
• With that knowlegde, I created proto-personas that improved understanding of the customer, aligned company employees, and helped target sales and marketing efforts around a shared understanding of their customers.
• I championed and led several user research studies including usability testing and a field study of multi-modal shopping behavior.
• I augmented the proto-personas with findings from this research and socialized the evolved personas with stakeholders.

Process Design & Design Operations

• I worked closely with engineering, product management, leadership, and sales to position design in a way that allowed for high quality work to be delivered in a way that other teams could execute and leverage.
• I changed the product development process to position design ahead of development and ensure better outcomes for users, faster develpment cycles, and reduced churn.

Hands-on Design

• I redesigned the end-to-end experience of the consumer indoor wayfinding app.
• I redesigned the white-label indoor mapping app for partners.
• I redesigned the B2B dashboard for indoor map analytics.
• I created concept designs for aggregate data visualization by geolocation.
• I led the design of a map based store inventory app.
• I created prototypes for user research and presented to executives.
• I overhauled the brand and created a clean, modern design language across all properties.
• I art-directed the redesign of the marketing website.

I created a shared understanding of customers among stakeholders with alignment personas

Point Inside had a number of services built around their indoor location technology that served different audiences at different levels of their customers organizations. Due to the many user types, there was no clear understanding of who the target customers were and there was no clear prioritization of marketing and sales efforts.

I worked closely with the leadership, product, and business development teams to create a set of personas. I leveraged their combined knowledge of customers together we captured all the different customers, identified the most important ones, and documented their relevant attributes.

I used different colors to visually differentiate departments and shades for different levels in the organization.

I created a modern brand identity that is reflected across all things Point Inside

Point Inside’s logo mark was outdated and the was no cohesive brand identity. I collaborated with an outside agency to create a brand that evolved from existing design elements and established a modern brand with a clear identity. We also developed and executed a strategy to make sure the Brand was reflected in all Point Inside properties including the visual UI design of Point Inside’s digital products.

My Role: Art Direction, Design Management, Hands-on Brand Design

I drove the integration of UX design and research into the Product Development Process

Since I was Point Inside’s first full-time designer, user experience as a discipline was not part of the product development process. I brought the executive leadership team, product managers, and the engineering team, together to map out Point Inside's product development process and drove the transformation to include design and user research and position.

I re-imagined the consumer indoor navigation app for malls and department stores

In a joined decision with product managers and leadership, we decided to start with the design of the consumer facing mobile app, informed by the personas and brand guidelines. The app offers people ways to create a shopping list and locate products from the list in the store. Users can see the shortest route through the store to get to all products. The success of this redesign established my credibility and enabled me to get support for other projects.

The image below is an example of a user flow I created. Sarah is one of the consumer shopping personas and the scenario is reflected in the description below each screen. This makes sure, there is a continuous connection all the way from user research to the final design.

I redesigned the presentation deck and the sales team loved it!

When I started at Point Inside, the sales team was using outdated and haphazardly designed materials and they knew it. Hiring another designer gave us enough capacity to completely overhaul their slide deck. The sales team was delighted and succeeded in closing more deals than before.

I designed a web application to visualize and analyze indoor location data by geo-region

I designed several new web properties and revamped existing ones, creating consistent interaction patterns and visual UI design across Point Inside’s web properties.

I designed a web application to visualize shopper movement and inventory

Point Inside used its indoor location tracking technology to gather data about shopper movement and location and combined that with inventory and purchasing data. I designed an interactive map for store operations managers to explore the information in order to optimize store layout, inventory management, and staffing schedules.

I designed a tablet app that provided inventory location information for store managers

I designed several new web properties and revamped existing ones, creating consistent interaction patterns and visual UI design across Point Inside’s web properties.

I hired another designer!

I was able to demonstrate the value of design and provide visibility into additional design needs that exceded my capacity as a team of one.

Leadership approved another design headcount and I brought another designer on board who proved to be an outstanding addition to the team.

Together we re-imagined the audit tool

The Audit Tool was a mobile application for store employees to collect product location data in-store and to report map errors. Product location data is used to improve our location assignment algorithm while map errors would be reported to our map team.

My Role: Art direction, research planning and execution of an on-site usability study at a local hardware store.

We made Point Inside’s indoor maps beautiful

Together with the designer I hired, we redesigned the visual design of the maps to give them a more modern look and feel.

I redesigned the trade show booth with the new brand. Breaking the 4th wall drew people in

I re-designed the trade show booth to be consistent with the updated brand. The sales team had a lot of fun with the new design as you can see in the pictures below and the response from trade-show atendees was great. Hear it from the sales team: “We even had people come up to our booth just to check out the cool graphics!"

I brought in an outside agency to overhaul the marketing website

My role: Art direction, UX design, brand stewardship, vendor management

One of the later projects was the redesign of the marketing website. This was a significant improvement of the overall visual design, and aligned the marketing site with the overall brand.

The image shows the responsive designs for the main pages of the site for different screen sizes. In addition it displays the 12-column grid and color, spacing, and font specifications for the developers.

The people, the work, and the impact I had made this a highlight of my career

One of the biggest learnings for me was how to demonstrate the value of UX and influence stakeholders and executives to support design efforts that ultimately benefited the business.