Over the past three years, I've been working on interesting user experience challenges at Prosper.com. Our team was assembled when Prosper was seven years old and was greatly in need of an overhaul. We've been steadily modernizing the services and design, transitioning into a mobile-friendly leader in our space based on innovation and a user-centric approach. The fin-tech industry can be confusing and the nature of the site requires thoughtful solutions for both borrowers and investors to help them manage the unique and complex financial accounts.
Our UX team is comprised of researchers and designer/user experience specialists. We identify challenges based on business needs, research, user interviews and see a project through from white-boarding, prototyping, internal reviews, user testing, development, beta releases, feedback gathering and public release.
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Easily transferring funds is an essential tool in helping our customers get money on and off the investor platform. We updated the interface from the previous design (circa 2007) in order to make the process much simpler and more flexible. I designed the flow in a modal overlay so that we could launch it from many areas on the site and allow the user to stay on the same page and in the context they were involved in, rather than taking them out of the experience and dropping them into a completely different page. Another goal was simplicity. I wanted the process to be a single click if using the default settings or a few clicks at most for setting up a custom schedule or a repeating transfer.
SNAPFISH 2008-2015
Snapfish.com is the internet's "digital attic," turning mountains of forgotten phone photos into physical keepsakes like photo books and holiday cards. The real UX beast here is solving "omni-channel friction," since users often snap photos on mobile but want a desktop for the heavy-duty editing. My job was balancing pro-level customization tools with an interface that didn't feel like a confusing cockpit, ensuring a single bad crop wouldn't ruin a sentimental gift.
I’m incredibly grateful to Snapfish for backing my pivot from Graphic Design to UX, a move that totally reshaped how I build digital products. I stepped up as Design Lead for our massive retail partners like Walmart and Walgreens, tailoring white-label experiences to their specific audiences. During my final three years, I helped build Snapfish 2.0 from the ground up, using deep research and stakeholder battles to deliver a best-in-class responsive site for Grandma and the rest of the gang.
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WHITE LABEL PARTNERS
Snapfish
Walgreens Photo
Walmart Photo
Snapfish wasn't just its own thing; we also partnered with heavy hitters like Walmart,Walgreens and eventually CVS to provide a white-label version of our platform that lived right inside their own sites. My job was to make sure these felt like a seamless part of their world rather than a clunky handoff. Since each brand has a totally different vibe and target customer, I didn't just slap on a new coat of paint. I provided the base re-skinned version and then collaborated with each partner to build custom projects specifically geared toward their unique user base(s). For four out of my seven years at Snapfish, I was the go-to person providing the design and UX deliverables that kept these partner teams on track and their customers happy.
LIBRARY
When we were building Snapfish 2.0, I got to help reinvent the Photo Library from the ground up. It was a total "back to the drawing board" moment where we used an iterative process to constantly tweak things based on feedback from both formal user tests and quick-and-dirty internal sessions. I touched everything from the timeline and its filtering tools to how people view and share their albums. If you look at the screen grab below, you'll see the photo "well" on the left. I really championed that feature after seeing how well a similar idea worked in our mobile app, and it eventually grew into the central organizational hub for the entire site.
UPLOADER
I took point on the Snapfish uploader for Facebook, Instagram, and Flickr, which was basically a six-month mission to stop making people jump through hoops to get their photos. We didn't just flip a switch; we took a smart, phased approach to totally overhaul the flow. I handled both the Visual and UX design to launch an "open feed" style that let people pull photos into their projects and timeline without the usual headache. Once we knew what the finish line looked like, my real job was mapping out a migration plan that wouldn't freak out our users or our developers, making sure every stakeholder was actually on board with the transition.