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WORK EXAMPLE: TROVE

Trove was a social news aggregation app on iOS, Android, and the web. I worked with a small team of mostly engineers over 18 months to conceive, build, and launch Trove.

It's representative of the work I most enjoy. My title was User Experience Principal, but I was known as "the swiss army knife" of the team and tapped into a 20+ years of product, UX, marketing and team-building experience. Anything I could jump in and help make better I did.

On its launch The New York Times called Trove "a treasure for news junkies." CNBC called Trove "a Pinterest board for news." USA Today and The Today Show also gave positive reviews.

Trove was shut down as a stand-alone app in December 2015 and became part of SocialCode.

 

THROUGHOUT MY TIME THERE

  • Leadership
    • Educated team
      • Strove to make everyone a UX expert: from branding and research methodologies to psychology
      • Established trust across team from junior to senior members and across functions to help get stuff done
      • Invited all members of team to directly interact with users, get team member questions asked, and invited challenges to my opinions and recommendations
  • UX Research
    • Ongoing research/analysis needs
      • Questions self and team
      • Across our products, ad products, competitors (port ex: UX Research Flipboard (iPad)), new apps, consumer trends, etc. (port ex.: ConsumerTrends)
    • User Feedback and UX Priority List
      • One doc with text of every bit of feedback, from investors and advisors to beta testers to team members to active and inactive users, searchable, with list of UX moves to make prioritized by my take on impact on growth (Product Managers would then work with team to look at cost/feasibility/time to implement, etc.)
  • Product Management
    • Questions we need to answer BEFORE launch (port ex: TroveAppUXQuestions)
    • Competitive analysis
      • Scoured public and private sources for everything from # of employees to hiring boards to traffic trends to funding to revenue sources and experiments
      • Visited public marketing events for Flipboard’s users

DEVELOPMENT AND BETA

  • Leadership
    • Combined Trove app with team name to align enthusiasm (vs. WaPo Labs)
  • UX Research
    • Ongoing individual weekly tests, with focus on what team wanted to learn, make calls on
    • Videos available instantly (port ex: TroveUXVideosv49)
    • Democratized UX ownership (*theme for me) (port ex: UX Research at Trove)
      • Public calendar
      • Anyone can ask for research
  • UX Design
    • Provide specific design ideas for designers to try
    • I’d open Photoshop, Illustrator and show visual design ideas regularly (onboarding, details of search results presentation, profile data, etc.)
    • Onboarding (port ex: Always Onboarding Overview)
  • Marketing
    • Segmentation (port ex: Trove—The Brand)
      • Problem solved*: no time or budget for “real” segmentation
    • Social Media
      • Helped build 113K followers on Twitter, 640K on Facebook.
    • Brand
      • Logo
      • Voice
        • Inconsistent over time (role of humor, “happy talk”, snark, dry, engineer messages
        • Meant we had to assert the audience (segmentation), position to differentiate (not USP or features, but brand) and then articulate voice/style for app UX (including all messages from small error screens to onboarding to support emails)
          • Created personas for the segments and for the brand
      • Name
        • Problem solved*: Brand name research: Social Reader vs. Trove vs. others (port ex: Social Reader Brand Research), how much to associate  Washington Post with Trove
      • Action name (Pick)
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PRE-LAUNCH

  • Leadership
    • Team Morale (Internal Marketing)
      • Posters to promote segments/personas (port ex: WW_App Gene Wilder)
    • Innovation
      • As a forcing function, get Product Manager and Marketing and CEO to write press release 3 months before launch (to clarify vision, positioning and guide team) (port ex: SR Press Release)
  • UX Research
  • UX Design
  • Marketing
    • Videos
    • PR Co-ordination (mention PR team name)
    • Created copy and concepts for ads
    • Business Development
      • Pitching Publishers
    • Legal
      • Primary editor of Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
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LAUNCH

  • Product Management
  • Community Development
    • Pitching Curators
    • Neil deGrasse Tyson (port ex: Astronomy also great for “What is Trove?"
    • Speaking
      • DC thing
    • Community Give-back
      • Stanford GSJ UX Mentorship (Contacted Ann, setting up sched Monday March 26)
  • Customer Support
    • Wrote and maintained Help section materials
    • Answered all support contact (Developed system for this)
    • Offered to get on phone with people
  • Marketing
    • Created copy and concepts for ads
      • Analyzed conversion (CTR, installs, repeat user funnels) and iterated weekly to increase conversion
    • Emails
      • Testing
      • Design
  • Business Development
    • Pitching Publishers