User Experience Product Manager

William Gaskill

User Experience Strategist and Research Leader

Portfolio:

https://uxfol.io/williamgaskill3

Email:

***************@*****.***

LinkedIn:

www.linkedin.com/in/bill-gaskill-a8b0677

PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY:

User Experience Strategist with 25 years extensive & proven experience, driving successful interactive design projects. Innovative team player with a strong background in all facets of Information UX Strategy, Research, Architecture & UxD (User Experience Design). Extensive experience designing complex solutions for complete digital environments such as web-based applications, social networking sites, and responsive scalable designs. Certified Agile Product Manager.

Industries: Financial services, retail, software and web industries, manufacturing, fitness, e-commerce,

e-learning, medical systems, insurance, and entertainment.

TOOLSETS & METHODOLOGIES:

InVision

UX Pin

Visio

Omnigraffle

Optimal Workshop

Morae

User Zoom

Silverback

Axure RP

SharePoint

DocuShare

Jira

Slack

Waterfall

Agile,

SafeAgile

Lean UX

Mural

EXPERTISE & SKILLS:

Generative Research

Primary Research

Secondary Research

Stakeholder Interviews

Heuristic Evaluations

Contextual Observations

Paper Prototyping

Lab Usability Testing

Remote Testing & Interviews

Ethnographic Research

Sitemaps, Wireframes & Workflows

Empathy Mapping

Functional Inventory

Enterprise UI standards

Formalizing Style Guide

Persona development

Storyboarding & Journey Maps

Multilingual Testing

EXPERIENCE:

September 2022 – Present

Freelance UX Research Consultant

Job Description: Provide strategic UX advice and services to executives and teams at small IT and web firms

Allstate Insurance Chicago, IL

April 2022 – August 22

Title: (FTE) User Experience Lead

Job Description: Lead a team of researchers for the Sales & Service area of Allstate UX, participated in redefining Allstate UX strategy practice, operationalizing all aspects.

Project: CEME/CFAR, PMP, My Account are all my area of responsibility. Lead project intake, work design and processes and approach,, mentor my team and other leads in research methods.

Allstate Insurance Chicago, IL

August 2021 – April 2022

Title: (contract) User Experience Lead

Job Description: Lead the research effort to determine a redesign of the Advisor Pro software which field and home office agents use to sell insurance policies, moving form a “relationship building” model to a “transaction first” model.

Project: Led the effort to conduct primary and secondary research including heuristic evaluations, contextual interviews, create personas, user flows, and journey maps, rapid prototype tests and summative tests on interactive prototypes. Presented findings to business and technology leaders, negotiated scope and change management to incorporate findings into the project backlog and prioritize features.

Best Buy, Minneapolis, MN

August 2019- February 2020

Title: (contract) Lead Employee Experience Strategist

Job Description: Started the UX Strategy practice at Best Buy Employee Experience

Project: Helped establish the Employee Experience Strategy & Research team and attending processes and artifacts. Acting on a tip that the Smart Home department had an unusually high returns/exchanges rate, we formed a multidisciplinary team comprised of business, IT, and UX members to validate and explore this challenge and what could be done about it through processes, UX and technology.

Leveraged past persona work for employees who work in smart products to construct provisional personas and conducted on-site observations and interviews to gain additional insights. We followed up with workshops to create empathy, journey and experience maps to refine the pain points and opportunities for each persona and then for the project as a whole. The work resulted in a cross functional enterprise project being formed.

US Bank Minneapolis, MN

January – July 2019

Title: (contract) Lead UX Researcher

Job Description: Single source of all customer research for large business defining project

Project: Advice For Everyone. As the only researcher for this dynamic Agile team, I conducted ethnographic, primary and secondary research, remote testing, surveys, and in person interviews, as well as a 7 team

co-creation activity to determine readiness for transforming US Bank from a traditionally transactional business to a relational, long term advice-based business. Presented our findings to the board, who funded the next phase of the project.

Best Buy Minneapolis, MN

February 2018 - December 2018

Title: (contract) UX Research Lead, Strategy Lead

Job Description: User Experience researcher and lead on multiple product teams

Project: Conducted the first persona workshops for Employee Experience, Led a UX strategy project for Returns, Trades, Exchanges and Recycling team utilizing process maps, contextual interviews, surveys, secondary research, co-creation workshops, software inventory, heuristic evaluations, hardware analysis, wireframes, prototype tests, and recommendations to create an in-store kiosk for recycling and trades, as well as mapping the necessary infrastructure for curbside pickups.

Taylor Digital Minneapolis, MN

June 2017 – December 2017

Title: (contract) Strategic Researcher

Job Description: Started as a researcher, ended as what we referred to as Strategic Researcher, repositioning research into the product definition, helping Product Managers define the high level requirements through research before design begins.

Project: “Operationalized” UX research and expanded it to include strategic product research for the new Klic Marketplace e-commerce application using:

Contextual interviews

Customer journey mapping

Presenting processes to improve communication to the strategy and planning team

Remote user testing of early semi-interactive prototypes

In person testing of advanced prototypes

Strategic Research involved ethnographic studies, diary studies, and in-person interviews to verify business assumptions before prototyping and testing concepts. .

Drove processes on Planning and Strategy Team to operationalize input from SME’s and verifying assumptions about future work.

Proto Labs Minneapolis, MN

January 2015 – April 2017

Title: User Experience Specialist

Job Description: Overall responsibility for marketing and IT UX strategy and execution for the enterprise.

Responsibilities:

Maintain and expand enterprise personas

Ensure usability of public website

Heuristic evaluations

Card sorting

Persona creation

Contextual interviews and observations

A/B testing

Accomplishments:

Transform the company from an inward-looking business to a user centric model

Drive B2B e-commerce research efforts and created interactive prototypes to demonstrate parallel design ideas from that research including:

Led a five-country remote and in-person international usability research effort, managing outside vendors in four languages, collating into one accessible report

Created a corporate style guide, interaction guidelines, collected design patterns - tested and proven

MakeMusic Minneapolis, MN

Feb 2014 - January 2015

Title: UX Lead

Job Description: Transform the education product of Make Music called Smart Music to match the end user’s (teachers, students) mental models for schools

Responsibilities:

●Heuristic evaluations

●In person usability testing

●Contextual interviews

●Persona creation

●Style guides

●Feeding research findings to designers and developers in a timely and effective manner

Accomplishments:

●Created and tested a complete interactive prototype redesign of the SmartMusic product which was launched in 2017

●Mentor of two talented designers within an Agile engineering environment

●Helped the UX team grow and flourish with support from vice president of products and supply evidence of which design works best and why

●UX Guidelines were published on SharePoint

Fifth Element Solutions Minneapolis, MN

2008 - 2014

●Redesigned the User Experience for an e-commerce website at a leading fitness company

●Implemented an informal user study methodology to test concepts and collect user artifacts for a major fitness company’s C2C e-commerce project

●Merged best practices of both Agile and User Experience to form a truly lean and less-do-over development environment while delighting the user base through direct engagement at an e-learning company

●Partnered with the University of Minnesota’s design program to provide a real world UX experience for students; mentored class groups and spoke at the University several times

2005-2008 Minnetronix Inc. St Paul, MN

Title: Usability Specialist

Responsibilities: Ensure compliance with FDA’s Usability Quality Standard, design embedded, touch screen, LED interfaces for medical devices.

Accomplishments:

Participated in FDA and ISO standards definition committee

Designed a character based small-screen UI for a blood testing device which determines if more expensive drugs are required for hypertension

Designed a touchscreen for a continuous glucose monitoring system (before iPhone was touchscreen)

Designed a dial interface for drilling out plaque in arteries

Designed a touchscreen interface for traumatic brain injuries

Contact this candidate