Stephen Brennan

• Conceptualized and designed a product life-cycle management experience for the private brand team. The 17 different personas were using offline excel files, creating inefficiencies by duplicating data, entering redundant data and relying on multiple formats to collaborate across multiple teams.
• The overarching user goals were to create a single source of truth, removing the need to enter any data in more than once and create a collaborative experience in which brand owners, designers, legal, compliance and product managers could collaborate. In future versions, the team is targeting to bring supplier and vendor personas into the experience.
• Coached junior product manager and evangelized the adoption of user stories and use cases to more readily understand our user’s complex workflows and needs. Setup UX review sessions with developers to ensure requirements and design standards were upheld.
• Leveraged a design system to rapidly ideate and gain stakeholder alignment. Created standardized interaction templates to ensure a consistent and intuitive UX across the experience.

• Conceptualized art of the possible for Human Resource’s workforce strategy platform. The business needed a synergistic analysis of supply, demand and cost drivers. The team also needed a deeper analysis of their current resources as well as a way to build out capabilities to better match skill sets with evolving market forecasts.
• Led the UX design and strategy for Oil and Gas Energy sector of a predictive maintenance platform. Ran workshop at client site to elicit feedback to create personas, narrative focus, user stories and flow for MVP. During workshop, created medium fidelity screens to both develop trust and confirm alignment across all parties.
• Led the design of a health care app for pharmacy sales reps that reduced administrative tasks efforts and increased their ability to focus clients and industry progression. Users currently leveraged excel to capture contact lists, notes, and sales data. This app was designed to combine healthcare practitioner, payor, script volume and target market data into a one stop experience to empower users during strategy planning, weekly and daily route planning and monitoring progress towards market goals.
• Championed accessibility best practiced for both design and development in design branding, design libraries and developer implementation best practices for AA compliance.

Spearheaded the creation of the experience design system for UI design and development teams. Authored the strategy and process for adoption, maintenance, and iterative evolution for the AA compliant designer assets and pattern documentation. Collaborated with the lead UI developer to create a AA compliant bootstrap theme and components for developers. Mentored visual designers in user centric approach and UX best practices.

• Partnered with front-end developers and designers to ensure the design system iteratively evolved with proper feedback loops.
• Championed accessibility compliance to ensure best in class design for impacted internal business units. Partnered with ADA team to ensure all patterns met compliance as outlined in the WCAG 2.0 guidelines.
• Collaborated with senior management to create WordPress site to house the UI library as well as design best practices and strategy.

UX Strategist for the Human Resource department's headcount planning application, Talent Pathways, which tracked global headcount analysis and trends to inform resourcing and financial strategy to best accommodate market shifts. Implemented strategic design thinking and user experience best practices to transform a cumbersome manual process into a dynamic cloud-based application. The first release focuses on empowering users to collaborate with colleagues and leverage historical trends to inform their forecasting decisions.

• Partnered with senior stakeholders, subject matter experts and product to scope user stories, roadmap strategy, manage immediate UX team, understand underlying business challenges and lead design workshops.
• Leveraged enterprise design system pattern library to both bolster use cases for pattern development while enabling rapid delivery of wires, flows, Sketch UI assets and InVision prototypes.

UX Strategist for the Murmuration Award-winning Leave of Absence redesign within the Human Resource business unit for Project Starling. Partnered with stakeholders to transform a process involving many disjointed services into a seamless consolidated experience. The leave of absence service wrapper surfaces action items to the user as needed within the context of their maternity leave journey.

• The previous maternity leave experience was handled manually through email with very little to no comprehension as to how employees should proceed through the process. Our focus was to increase user comprehension to proactively guide them through experiencing a major milestone.
• Project artifacts include system flows, user flows, user stories, user testing, design thinking workshops and an InVision prototype to communicate the experience to senior leadership. Led design workshops with a focus on whiteboarding to drive requirements and user stories, scope complexity and envision UI views across the project.

Championed UX best practices and data informed strategy for experiences spanning mobile, desktop and tablet across all user touch points on Sears.com e-commerce experience. Standardized UX deliverables and created an enterprise Axure library which was adopted across the entire UX organization. Collaborated heavily with UXR team to define a set of standards for user testing of prototypes for more efficient feedback cycles.

• Created and managed a device agnostic enterprise Axure library for the UXA organization. Championed patterns and standards usage for both UX architects as well as UI visual designers by increasing adoption with the Axure library. Designed and launched an Axure project template to preload enterprise styling into the native Axure widgets, render enterprise fonts into AxShare and uphold consistent IA naming conventions for deliverables. The UX toolkit enabled all teams to leverage user testing and iteratively improve experiences in a much more efficient manner. Mentored junior visual designers, junior user experience architects and researchers to evolve the current process across all domains.
• Lead Principal UX Architect for the deals program to bring awareness and comprehension to limited time and limited quantity deals across the buy flow (top and bottom of funnel). Collaborated across all domains and business units to design a consistent cohesive experience across all platforms.
• Redesigned the online layaway experience, which was the company’s highest profile project for Q1 2015. Created user stories, system requirements, IA system flow, UI layout for purchasing and of new and existing layaway contracts. Implemented content strategy across the entire site to enhance the conversational tone regarding layaway payments for top and bottom of the funnel.
• Redesigned the store finder functionality. Collaborated with stakeholders to increase user efficiency and satisfaction. First to incorporate Google map API into the store locator experience.
• Designed the rescheduling feature for shipping and delivery orders. Established interaction design standards that are now implemented across the organization for grouped item selection states. Deliverables included requirements, wires, UXR scrips, UXR flows as well as resulting test data.

Created the adoption strategy and content management process for a major Fortune 500 company to drive brand awareness, increase employee satisfaction, decrease employee turn-over rates, and build better relationships between corporate and retail employees.

• Presented at the Emerging Technology seminar, which was attended by over 150 management and executive management at McDonald’s Hamburger University. Wrote and presented over 90 minutes of content educating the audience on mobile technologies, mobile implementation best practices as well as exciting examples spanning multiple industries.
• Developed Adoption and Engagement strategies for the restaurant engagement portal to improve restaurant communications and product awareness to increase operational margins. Interviewed stakeholders across a diverse set of roles to identify business needs, user stories and analytic targets. Defined and streamlined content management process to more efficiently release content to the restaurant engagement portal. Worked extensively with the legal team to halve the time required for approval.
• Designed a gamification system to further drive operational improvement and community morale within restaurants. The system tied user behaviors within the intranet portal to day-to-day tasks with the goal of increasing brand pride and operational efficiencies.