Hi, My Name is Nick

A Little About Me

I'm a data product designer with a strong belief in effective UX as a tool for turning data insights into impact.

My colleagues and I atGro Intelligenceare committed to putting advanced analytics behind our gobal effort to fight climate change, and ensure food security.

Previously I've worked atMosaic.techleading the design of new, automated approaches to strategic finance, and atSalesforceas a Sr. Designer of the data products used to manage their global fleet of infrastructure.

I built my background in data visualization primarily atAbt Associates,where I served on a tech consulting team designing applications to meet client needs at all levels.

I've also had the opportunity to build my skills in user research atForesee Results, where I helped clients improve the usability of their websites and applications. I did this part time as I earned my masters in UX design from the University of Michigan.

Skills

Data Product Design

Interaction Design

Business Analysis

Product Managment

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Experience

Download

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Data Products

Data Product Design Process

Gro Intelligence, 2021-Present

Salesforce, 2019-2021

Abt Associates, 2013-2017

America's New Jim Crow

World Development Indicators

County Level US Map

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Case
Studies

Case Studies

Climate Risk Analysis - Gro Intelligence

Custom Financial Reports - Mosaic.tech

Falcon Productivity Insights - Salesforce

Org Migration Intelligence - Salesforce

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Climate Risk Analysis - Gro Intelligence

Putting data behind our response to the ever-mounting risk of climate change impacts.

1. Defining the Problem

Asset managers and government agencies at all levels are necessarily experts at modeling and responding to risk. Such analysis informs strategies for allocating government support and intervention, managing vast portfolios of financial and physical assets, and decisions around how best to support the U.S. financial system at a macro level.

Although we’ve grown incredibly advanced in our ability to model and respond to various risk factors, the risk of climate change impacts, such as drought, flooding, and natural disasters, are not typically components of these models. This inhibits us from planning for such risks with our full strategic potential.

Working with our stakeholders to sufficiently understand current processes for risk modeling, primarily within the government and financial services sectors, we sought to understand the central questions our users would need to answer to effectively respond to climate risk factors:

Which [assets/regional areas] are exposed to climate risk factors?
Within this set, where is exposure great enough to warrant a change in strategy?
Depending on the [assets/regional areas] exposed, and the factors they’re exposed to, what strategies do I employ to mitigate such risk?

2. Journey Mapping

This understanding then informed a more detailed set of ‘journey maps’ for each of our high level personas. These maps outline the processes by which our users might ideally understand, respond to, and then operationalize climate risk factors within their existing models.

These analysis journeys essentially walk through the ‘customer jobs’ to be completed with our application, acting as an integral component to the design of an effective and engaging experience.

3. Fast-Iterating Wireframes

Based on this understanding of our intended user journeys, we iterated quickly over wireframes with our stakeholders to understand how to most actionably present this information in an interactive interface. The goal in this effort was to communicate the visual understanding our users require to effectively build climate factors into their risk modeling process.

This wireframing exercise was particularly valuable at this stage, as in addition to speed to delivery, wireframes offer the advantage of focusing the conversation on features, functionality, and layout, without getting bogged down in styling and other cosmetic elements too early in the process.

4. Hi-fi Interactive Prototyping

After several wireframe iterations, we had the buy-in we needed to invest in hi fidelity prototypes. These interactive mockups gave our users a real world sense of how this application would look and feel in production, and ultimately supplied our own engineering team with pixel-perfect specs for front-end implementation.

While we began to refine these prototypes initially via stakeholder interviews around prototype walkthroughs, we ultimately had the opportunity to inform low level usability via several rounds of usability testing. Usability tests are an immensely effective tool for identifying UX difficulties by observing users navigate through real scenarios, using realistic data.

Custom Financial Reports - Mosaic.tech

Empowering users to fully customize financial statements, without any of Excel's headaches.

1. Defining the Problem

While Mosaic was already seamlessly streaming client data into standard financial reports, users were clamoring for the ability to customize the layout, metrics, and styling of these reports for investors, board members, and other stakeholders. As a result, users were moving out of Mosaic, back into Excel for this level of customizability.

The question became, "How do we afford this level of flexibility in Mosaic, so our users can continue to avoid the data quality headaches characteristic of Excel based reporting?"

2. Fast-Iterating Wireframes

Having worked with our customers to gain a sufficient understanding of their difficulties, the next challenge was to understand what the ideal solution would look and feel like.

With our customers knowing what they wanted to accomplish, but not exactly how Mosaic would accomplish it, we began iterating over simple wireframes to home in on an ultimate UX solution.

In addition to quick time to delivery, wireframes at this stage offer the advantage of focusing the conversation on features, functionality, and layout, without getting bogged down in styling and other cosmetic elements too early in the process.

3. Hi-fi Interactive Prototyping

After several wireframe iterations, we had the buy-in we needed to invest in hi fidelity prototypes. These both gave our customers a real world sense of how these custom reports would look and feel in Mosaic, and supplied our engineering team with pixel-perfect specs for front-end implementation.

Falcon Productivity Insights - Salesforce

Empowering engineering teams with the insights they need to drive process efficiency.

1. Defining the Problem

Enhancing and maintaining the code behind Salesforce involves many complex engineering workflows. When things don't go as planned, engineers spend hours if not days diagnosing the problem, wasting valuable time and energy.

At a higher level, these teams lacked the overall visibility and targeted KPIs necessary to identify bottlenecks across the organization, and effectively set goals for addressing them.

Having gained a thorough understanding of the problem, my team and I began with the following questions, "What metrics do these teams need to effectively manage their processes? What data do we have, or can we get, to speak to these metrics?" And finally, "What are the most effective ways of presenting this information, so as to empower these already busy engineering teams?"

Getting answers to these questions involved iterating with engineering teams to fully understand the complex flows they manage, and any considerations to include in an initial set of designs.

2. Fast-Iterating Wireframes

Continuing our discussions with engineering leads across the organization led us towards a set of metrics that we quickly began garnering from available data. Meanwhile, because this was new territory for many engineers, most didn't have any idea as to how to display this information for maximum utility at various levels of the organization.

With the right metrics in hand, we began iterating over simple wireframes, running each iteration by engineering teams and other stakeholders, systematically collecting feedback.

3. Hi-fi Interactive Prototyping

After several wireframe iterations, we had the buy-in we needed to invest in hi fidelity prototypes. These both gave our users a real world sense of how these dashboards would look and feel in production, and supplied our own engineering team with pixel-perfect specs for front-end implementation.

Org Migration Intelligence - Salesforce

Empowering capacity planners to effectively manage our growing suite of customer activity

1. Defining the Problem

30 million users worldwide on Salesforce are invited not only to make full use of Salesforce and its acquisitions, but to write their own code within Salesforce's ecosystem.
Central to Salesforce's value proposition is trust. Customers expect any code, data, and user activity taking place on Salesforce's cloud to be fully performant, reliable, secure, and compliant with any local regulations.

As a result, teams of cloud capacity analysts, known as capacity planners, focus on ensuring plenty of cloud resources are available to each customer, in a cost effective manner. Doing so means continuously migrating customers off of 'hot' or highly-utilized cloud environments to 'cool,' less-utilized environments.

As the customer base continued to grow, it became increasingly difficult for capacity planners to quickly and effectively identify 'hot' environments, and more importantly, the ideal 'cooler' environments for customers to migrate to. Timeliness is key here, as migrating a given customer requires a workflow of verification, testing, migration prep, and sometimes legal considerations.
Essentially, 'cool' environments need to be found quickly so that customers can migrate before their environments get to 'hot.'

Having gained a thorough understanding of this problem, my team and I began with the following questions, "What information do capacity planners need to effectively identify the 'hot' environments from which to migrate customers, and to which 'cool' environments can these customers migrate?" And, from a visual design perspective, "How can we best display this information so that capacity planners can make these migration decisions in time?"

With these questions in mind, we worked with capacity planning teams to first establish a user journey that fit within their requirements and constraints for effective migration planning.

2. Fast-Iterating Wireframes

Based on the problem defined and the 'ideal' user journey developed in partnership with capacity planning, we began iterating quickly over simple wireframes. These wireframes were meant to demonstrate what a data product might show, in what way, at each stage of the user journey.