Hi! I'm Sydney
I am a proven leader with over 10 years experience building and empowering high-performing teams that include User Experience Designers, Researchers, Content, Optimization, Operations, and Accessibility.
I specialize in product vision, strategy, storytelling and building experiences that scale. I believe in building teams that work together and empowering them to focus on what they do best, while I clear roadblocks and maintain a clear vision. I love to help my team refine their personal brand and define career goals.
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Direct, Mentor and Manage User Experience:
Work across portfolios to help architect the User's Experience. Collaborate with Design, Research, Digital Operations, Marketing, and Measurement teams to ensure that all teams are collaborating cross-functionally. -
Coach and Care:
Coach direct reports on elevating the quality and maturity of their practice and ensure they have a strategic impact on solutions and tell a compelling story. -
Team Growth and Management:
Partner with the Design Operations to manage the hiring, optimization, and growth of the team to build a learning culture, ensure appropriate project focus, and to develop their skillset. Promote and train teams to engage with business senior leadership as consumer champions.
All of the work included in these examples were designed in tandem by me and my brilliant team.
Areas of Expertise
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Designing for Artificial Intelligence
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Design + strategic thinking
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Workshop facilitation
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Qualitative + quantitative research
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Design systems
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Mobile + adaptive design
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Information architecture
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Taxonomy
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Agile methodology
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Service Design Delivery Model
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Accessibility
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Innovation / problem-solver
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Coach + mentoring
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Analytics + optimization
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Collaboration
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Front end development
Highlights
Tools
Figma
Adobe
Photoshop
Lucid
Salesforce
Sketch
Adobe
Illustrator
Pendo
Azure Devops
Voice Flow
Adobe
After Effects
Chat GPT
CoCounsel
Adobe
Analtyics
Adobe Experience
Manager
HotJar
Microsoft
PowerBI
Atlassian
Aha
Stravito
Five Stages of Design Thinking—and Why They Matter
01 The Empathize Stage
Like any good process, Design Thinking starts with questions. A lot of questions. Who is using the app? What are they hoping to achieve from it? And, most importantly, what is going wrong, and why are they frustrated with the current user experience. Being able to empathize with the user on the good and the bad will help you hone in on what’s working (so you can do more of that) and what’s causing users the most headaches and why. Often this stage is done through observation of, and interviews with, the actual users of the app.
02 The Define Stage
It’s time to put all those answers to work. The goal here is to look at the observations through the lens of the overall business goals (see, we haven’t forgotten!) and define the most concrete and important issues for the users. In essence, it’s about framing the most pressing challenges in the context of what both the business and users expect from the app.
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03 The Ideate StageThis is the fun part and the part that really anyone in the company can be part of. Now that the main issues have been identified, it’s time to come up with as many solutions as possible. It’s here that you think big and aren’t afraid to change your minds or contradict yourselves. At the end of the session, it’s time to pick the winners from the group. The criteria for a winner will vary by project, but overall you can ask yourself a couple of questions to help guide your decision.Which solution best benefits the user?Which one meets our business goals?What is the most viable from both a development and go-to-market standpoint? The answers to these questions should help you narrow in on the solution that will best fit your, and your users’, needs.
4. Putting Ideas into Action – The Prototype & Development StageIt’s time for the virtual rubber to hit the digital road and see how that solution fares in the wild. It’s here, or a digital product agency, will first create a quick and dirty prototype to get a gut check on what works and what needs some tweaks. Employing an inexpensive, scaled-down version of the product/features and asking users to take a turn trying them out helps you narrow in on what’s doing the job, what isn’t, and why.
5. The Testing Stage
Finally, it’s time to send those prototypes through the wringer. You’ll break them in as many ways as possible and figure out everything that can go wrong. This is the redefine stage where you see the wreckage of solutions laid out in front of you, and learn from them.Then, it’s iteration time. Taking all that you learned from what went wrong, you head back to The Prototype and Development stage. Change this, fine-tune that, get rid of that feature altogether—and then you test, and test, and test again.Design Thinking is a practical way to solve problems. At once fixed and fluid, it provides the structure needed to build brilliant digital products and the flexibility to respond to last-minute changes. It’s a process and one that takes time to get running smoothly.
Author: Angie Taylor | Big Nerd Ranch
