SEDNA

Overview & Challenge

SEDNA is a scale-up, venture capital funded company solving team communications at scale. SEDNA users work in an extremely time and money sensitive environment where they must also be able to handle sometimes thousands of emails per day.

My work at SEDNA was to not only rework the product interface requiring days of training to be intuitive, but to then to direct the design towards an automated and transactional platform built on top of email.

Role & Approach

I began work with SEDNA freelance to help with category design (not able to be shown) defining how to redesign email and high volume communications. After moving to a full-time Senior Designer role, I began the process of implementing the people and pieces to move the product in the direction of the category design, at which point I had helped put the research and design teams in place and became Design Lead.

From the beginning, the goal was to establish user-centred design as a practice. This included hiring designers and researchers to build out this practice as well as begin a design system to further facilitate product transformation.

Results

• Helped hire an entire design team of 8, 4 interaction (which I line managed) and 3 interface designers, including a interface design lead
• Led the redesign of critical product components including navigation, message composition and reading and the design of new features like automation
• Led the beginning of a complete UI overhaul of the platform and began work on establishing a design system
• Conducted the first user research at the company, then helped start a User Research practice and recruited a lead researcher to build out those efforts
• Established service design as a practice in the first service mapping of the product to examine the onboarding and customer support processes and systems
• Performed and assisted leadership in design, research and development integration and process improvement
• Performed DesignOps management in overseeing and helping ensure effective processes in conjunction with development. This also included help with and creation of creative strategies to drive growth in design and collaboration with Product and Engineering.
• Performed design advocacy and introduced a culture of user-centred design

Managed interaction design and helped with interface overhaul of UI

• Completely new navigation paradigm and system
• Reworking of major user interactions and workflows
• Began and helped managed design system for complete new UI look and feel

Oversaw design development of automations and interactions

Initial UI realignment and reworking