University of Oregon

Senior Director, Product Design & User Research at HireRight

Denver Metropolitan Area

I currently lead HireRight’s interdisciplinary global Product Design organization, consisting of UI/UX design and strategy, UX research, content design, animation, accessibility, and design systems.
Accomplishments include:
- Formalizing and scaling the Product Design organization from 2 people to 16 by attracting and hiring world-class designers and contractors, writers, and researchers, while also defining design delivery processes, design principles, job families, and team OKRs
- Defining and championing the north star for the reimagining of HireRight’s 4 platform user experiences
- Conceiving and launching our customer-centric HireRight Innovation Lab, which allows us to co-design our products with our customers
- Empowering our cross-functional Product and Engineering teams to explore adopting an accessibility-first approach with weekly accessibility design reviews and dedicated ‘Accessibility Learning Hours’
- Socializing and broadly demonstrating the power of design’s impact on the company’s bottom line and across the organization
- Helping integrate quantitative analytics tools and guiding the selection of 3rd party technologies that allow us significantly improve our product experiences

HireRight

Senior Director, Product Design & UX Research

- I led Prologis’ experience design practice across Prologis’ customer-centered digital applications. Duties included:
-  Directing our globally dispersed agencies
-  Implementing a design system to be used by 300+ developers and designers
-  Customer research
-  Facilitating design thinking exercises
-  Mentoring our internal design team
-  Ensuring brand value and consistency were integrated
-  Helping teams solve problems and deliver value to our cherished customers

Prologis

Director of User Experience Design

- I led our product, marketing, and engineering teams to ensure a meaningful customer experience. My teams frequently ran experiments and learned which levers enabled TRELORA to disrupt the real estate industry in a scalable and sustainable manner. Activities included:
-  I was accountable for our patent-pending internal-facing product, which helped our agents handle 20x the volume of transactions as compared to a traditional Realtor
-  I oversaw and defined the product and marketing strategy, the website and our consumer web app, all ad campaigns, offers and promotions, email marketing, PR, the TRELORA brand, TRELORA’s investor pitch and the creation of TRELORA’s first iOS app
-   My team regularly talked with, listened to, and observed our customers to offer an unparalleled real estate buying and selling experience that fundamentally changes how residential real estate is purchased and sold
-  I coached our sales teams on how to become trusted advisors, which increased our lead to payment by 31.2% YoY
-  Achieved 5-star ratings on Yelp and Google as well as an 87 NPS, underscoring the love and effort that was put into delivering an extraordinary experience to every customer

TRELORA Real Estate

Chief Experience Officer (CXO)

We provided UX, UI, and product strategy services to various public and privately held direct-to-consumer technology companies. Our wheelhouse included:
-  The design of 5-star mobile apps, pitch decks for startups, product roadmaps, retention-focused email campaigns, and high-conversion consumer acquisition funnels
-  Leading the design for large consumer brands such as Experian and <a href="http://Whitepages.com">Whitepages.com</a> and for creative, scrappy startups such as Zoom app and (backed by Bill Gates) Tastemakers app

Nies Design

Fractional CXO

Led all user experience practices for FullContact’s desktop web app as well as their Android and iOS apps. Provided direction to the front-end web and mobile dev teams, and defined a new look and feel, corrected and standardized existing UX patterns, established a visual language and adjusted written content that significantly elevated the usefulness and usability of the app across all platforms. I partnered with our creative director to design a working interactive style guide that enabled developers to physically see what elements should look like and how they should behave. I introduced a UX roadmap for the organization that spelled out strategies for the coming year and in an effort to help the greater team develop a sense of empathy for the user, I introduced primary and secondary personas representative of the FullContact Address Book’s core users as well as the API’s core users. I interviewed and observed numerous customers regularly to test out new concepts, identify issues in current and pending product offerings and then shared insights from these sessions with the product, marketing, and development teams accordingly. The FullContact Business Card Reader app I designed with my talented co-workers was featured as a “New + Noteworthy” app in the App Store under the Productivity category during the Summer of 2013.

FullContact Inc.

Director of User Experience

In my tenure, I became the Head of User Experience & Product Design for all of Experian Consumer Services’ responsive design websites and native apps. My team and I:
-   Launched the Experian Credit Tracker apps for Android (4.6-Star Rating in the GooglePlay Store), iPhone and iPad (5-Star Rating and Top 25 Free Finance app on iTunes) in the Spring of 2015
-  Celebrated the rise of <a href="http://freecreditscore.com">freecreditscore.com</a> for iPad, which launched in early January 2014,  and reached an all-time high ranking of #2 in the App Store’s Finance category with a 5-star rating from the majority of users
-  I oversaw UX research through regular face-to-face customer interviews and surveys, which allowed us to innovate our products by making informed decisions based on direct feedback

Experian

Head of UX & Product Design

As a part of Level 3's Innovation group, I actively managed design team execution, served as the key point of contact for many of our internal clients, created informed user experiences, and led productive, creative sessions amongst internal stakeholders.

Key responsibilities:

-  Led & collaborated with a multi-disciplinary design team for user experience planning & software development
-  Responsible for the execution of interaction design & visual UI design of customer-facing and internal mobile and web applications
-  Facilitated dialog around end-user requirements and business requirements
-  Guided clients through key design engagements
-  Performed user-centered design research
-  Drove innovative solutions within platform constraints & technical limitations
-  Developed interaction models and conceptual frameworks of experience
-  Researched interaction design trends
-  Researched technology trends

-  2 Design Patents Issued ***

Here's a link to an article that covers the app I built with my team: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/it-leadership/ipads-for-all-one-sales-teams-story/d/d-id/1102353">http://www.informationweek.com/it-leadership/ipads-for-all-one-sales-teams-story/d/d-id/1102353?</a>

Level 3 Communications

Lead UX Architect

Designed all user-centered design experiences and UI associated with Ball’s global portal which services 15,000 users in more than 50 locations in Asia, Europe, North America and South America. As a primary advocate for internal customers, I captured their needs through a user-centered design process and translated those discoveries into actionable user stories and visual solutions that aligned with both the users’ needs and the goals of the organization. I managed the prioritization of deliverables on our backlog and demoed completed features to both customers and stakeholders. I conducted user interviews, card sorting exercises, persona development, usability and user interaction design studies and employed user satisfaction surveys to validate we were designing an end product that was user-centric. I advised Ball’s Corporate Marketing and Human Resources leadership teams on best practices regarding internal marketing, email and social media campaigns. I created information architecture models, wireframes and prototypes to provide and execute vision and strategy to the portal business and portal development teams.

Ball Corporation

Lead User Experience Designer

I provided and executed strategies that enabled my customers to position themselves as equals to the giants in their industry. This was achieved by strategically leveraging my clients’ value proposition through interactive and printed collateral. We specialized in taking a client’s idea and producing an end product that always exceeded expectations, elevated brand recognition, and increased revenue. I have a broad knowledge of advanced Internet applications as well as ecologically responsible printing processes, and effective communication strategies. My clients received the best and most appropriate end products from brochures, user interface design, Flash animations, web sites, tradeshow booths, PowerPoint presentations to targeted email campaigns. My clients ranged from small high tech start ups to Fortune 500 companies.

SaberMedia

Creative Director

I joined forces with internal business owners to define functional workflow processes that enabled the design department to effectively support the internal Sales and Marketing division of Level 3 Communications. I was responsible for the management and creative direction of the design team that included 12 art directors and web designers based in both the US and the UK working in a bill-back, agency-model environment. Together, we redesigned all of Level 3’s printed and interactive sales/marketing collateral including Level 3’s 9 localized web sites, extranet, several microsites and over 30 intranet sites. I directed team members to develop innovative, high-bandwidth Flash-based promotional materials. I pitched project concepts and proposals to executive management. I developed job descriptions and salary scale for the Creative Services team. I worked collaboratively with internal project management, account management, and application development teams to execute meaningful deliverables for Level 3.

Global Manager of Creative Services

I elevated Quark’s market reputation by defining design standards, and overseeing innovative product campaigns through the use of both printed collateral and multimedia components. We developed quirky, unconventional advertising campaigns, product collateral and direct mail pieces that attracted new employees and demonstrated the innovation behind Quark’s suite of products. I art directed interactive CD-ROMs, interactive kiosks and Internet-based projects as well as directed video shoots which promoted the executive leadership’s vision to Quark’s customer base. I designed and produced interactive training materials, web sites, graphics, animations, and illustrations for each assignment. Worked with product management teams to develop product names and user interface (UI) for new and existing Quark products. I interfaced with international offices, subsidiaries and corporate partners to define product positioning internationally. I art directed and reviewed some of the members work of Quark’s internal design team to assure compliance with corporate standards and creative quality.

Mindy Nies