Sallie Wormer

As the Director of Digital Learning Services, I was asked to look into our university book ordering process. There were reports of frustration from all sectors - students, faculty, IT and the bookstore. In isolation, no singular process was faulty but holistically they bottle-necked where they converged and created problems for everyone.  Each perspective seemed unwilling to budge, but this map showed that it was a problem for systems thinking to solve. This helped create the impetus for change - no one wanted the students to suffer.

Carlow University | Pittsburgh, PA | 2012

The Youth Media Advocacy Project (YMAP) pairs university communication majors with high school classes in under-served districts which often lack consistent classroom technology.  The elevator speech lesson was originally conceived as a video, but I opted to design and create a graphic novel to mediate in-class technology instability. Using actual images of previous students (with permission) was well received by the current students. The project was part of a year long curriculum stabilization project that I oversaw.

YMAP @ Carlow University | Pittsburgh, PA | 2016

One of my responsibilities at Carlow was optimizing our SharePoint intranet.  Typically what this meant was creating and outfitting team sites to fit each team's needs and team members’ tech savviness.  Occasionally I got to dig into InfoPath and SharePoint Designer when form-related workflows were needed;  this was the case of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) proposal submission and review process.  I redesigned the proposal form to make it more usable, then built a multi-phase multi-condition workflow.  Throughout I solicited user feedback through iterative testing to make sure things were working 'as expected.'

IRB @ Carlow University | Pittsburgh, PA | 2015

Rarely do organizations get to design their ideal solutions from scratch, and too often purchased solutions are chosen for reasons that don’t include actual user needs.  Over my career, I've been quite vocal about ensuring user voices are meaningfully included in decision making.  To me, that includes co-establishing the key features to evaluate through observation, conversation and/or discussing primary tasks with users.  The relative criticality of each feature is also necessary to understand, as buying or building solutions typically means compromise.  This example shows the criteria elicited from faculty for a new video conferencing solution, and their aggregated and weighted perceptions how each product (in columns) stacked up. 

Carlow University | Pittsburgh, PA | 2012

As part of an intranet support site for a large CRM vendor, we first conducted a heuristic analysis to inform our user testing tasks.  A primary hypothesis to test was that the navigation was the most problematic feature of the site.  This sample shows how much each participant chose to use either search or navigation (or change strategies), how many tasks they then reached, and how successful they ultimately were.  In addition to being the team lead, I took a major role in designing the user testing tasks and moderator's guide. 

Client:  Pegasystems | Cambridge, MA | 2016

Participants in a diary study about online technical community usage clustered at different points on the study's behavioral vectors.  By splitting the clusters into two personas - a seasoned veteran and a hungry young developer - the results suddenly made much more sense.  Solo hands-on research project for Field Methods course.

Client:  Pegasystems | Cambridge, MA | 2016