Heather S. Roth

CITI WEB APPLICATION TOOLKIT: At Citi, our UX Team was responsible for creating the Web Application Toolkit, a comprehensive style guide and design system to bring standardization to internal applications across the enterprise. As part of our efforts, I conducted extensive research into the users of the style guide as we made the transition to creating a UI Toolkit for ease of use among developers. Artifacts created: personas, extensive report, sketches, list of recommendations, documentation of use cases of the style guide across the enterprise, UI Scorecard to effectively "score" applications using the style guide and provide immediate feedback to development teams about adherence to the standards

MODEL RISK UI: one of our client projects centered on understanding an internal enterprise application focused on maintaining models for risk management. As part of the research efforts, I conducted cognitive walkthroughs of the application to learn more about existing pain points and design opportunities. Highlighted here is one of the artifacts from the research findings - a user flow with pain points superimposed to understand challenging aspects of the user journey. This diagram was consulted significantly within our internal team and by the client during the redesign process.

USABILITY TESTING: as part of several projects while working at Citi, I conducted task-based, remote, moderated usability testing sessions with employees across the enterprise and across various regions. Most of these testing sessions were conducted in English but some were also conducted in Spanish. For each usability testing session, I crafted a test script guided by learning objectives and tasks meant to either baseline an existing application or test one of our design iterations. In addition to reporting data such as time on task and perceived difficulty level, I also consistently administered the System Usability Scale survey for a consistent benchmark measurement.

RULES HARMONY PROJECT: our team was tasked with redesigning a very complex rules engine used to craft regulatory reports sent to the Federal Reserve Board of the United States. I designed a research plan that included stakeholder interviews with SMEs, user interviews and walkthroughs with rule creators and editors, usability testing, concept testing, and card sorting. This image showcases my process to quickly identify pain points and categorize them from severe to moderate to mild and list out each issue with a potential recommendation based on the research. Often these presentations would be interspersed with paper sketches or LoFi digital mock-ups created in Axure. In this project, previous efforts had been made to document issues with the Rules Harmony system, but our research uncovered several additional unique pain points to consider in the redesign.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT TRACKING PROJECT: Citi uses various internal applications to document project management efforts across the enterprise. We conducted a deep dive in one of their project management tools to understand who was using them and what their main needs were so that we could identify areas for improvement. I created a series of personas to use as a communication a design tool that would guide our work throughout the project. As a team, we facilitated prioritization sessions with the client by reviewing design recommendations crafted from user research to determine the highest impact for the user while also acknowledging level of effort, budget, and timeline constraints. Several rounds of concept testing were conducted to de-risk initial redesign concepts followed up with extensive usability testing to refine the final designs.

GIRLZ IN IT: I participated in the facilitation of the very first GIrlz in IT event at Citi in Irving, TX. Young women in middle school and high school were invited to attend a free day of engineering, design, and information technology sessions. I modified an existing Stanford d School design exercise to lead sessions on design thinking and user-centered design practices where the attendees learned about identifying a problem statement, crafting research questions, drafting interview guides, talking with users, and incorporating user feedback in sketches and then building an initial prototype. Pictured here (Left to Right): Leticia Molina, Sr. UX Manager & Heather Roth (me), UX Researcher