Product Experience

The size and culture of the design group changed many times since I joined in 2015. There were three design organizations: Brand/marketing, Product Experience, and Industrial Design via Fuseproject. Product Experience was responsible for the user experience of hardware as well as the end to end design of all software features. The size and shape of the team varied greatly, ranging from over fifteen to just five at its smallest.

During my time at Jawbone, I worked with three cross-functional teams, learned from talented mentors, and experienced various leadership styles. Because Jawbone’s products involved both hardware and software, I was fortunate enough to work on aspects of product design for both wearables and digital surfaces. My responsibilities included research, system design, user experience, and visual design for multiple platforms. Additionally, I contributed heavily to a new design language system for the UP app.

The fast-paced culture and my shifting responsibilities allowed me to quickly take on responsibility and ownership of the features I owned.

The New Products Team

My first position at Jawbone focused on projects directly related to our Research & Development efforts. I worked under the Creative Director of New Products and along with our signal algorithms and hardware engineering teams to design wireframes, user experience frameworks, and vision decks for potential new UP products/features.

I conducted secondary research on health and wellness along with competitive analyses of other products. Even more, I gathered insights through user interviews, diary studies, and usability testing I helped conduct with externally recruited users.

Lastly, I was involved in proposing strategic, feature, and physical requirements for new hardware products that were in conceptual development at the time.

The Signals Tribe

In the Fall of 2015, the company was restructured to combine the engineering and design organizations under one unified product delivery group. We began working in a tribe model, which gave us closer access to our cross-functional counterparts.

I was part of the Signals Tribe, where I continued pushing forward projects started on my previous team. For the first two months, I worked with a Senior Visual Designer on several new feature proposals that would have better-contextualized data within UP. After the designer left Jawbone, I became design lead responsible for all the features developed within the tribe.

My main focus was a total redesign of the activity logging portion of the UP app, which included workouts and sleep. I was responsible for defining the user experience for hardware & software, ultimately creating new functionality that improved usability and product experience objectives. Later in the design process, I worked closely with the Design Director to develop a new visual design language that would begin to roll out with this feature. I then independently delivered final assets and collaborated with engineers to implement the design.

The Behavior Change Tribe

In August 2016, I took the opportunity to join another tribe as the design lead. This new role provided a fresh opportunity to develop new skills in behavioral psychology, iterative testing, and data analysis.

The Behavior Change Tribe’s focus was to use experimentation to statistically prove that interventions in the UP system could help people move more, sleep better, or lose weight. To that end, everything developed within this tribe was A/B tested with users. My previous role was all about unification and systemization of features, so I was excited to exercise a new set of skills, work in shorter timelines, and test the effectiveness of many divergent ideas.

My work generally focused on improving the value of Smart Coach, UP’s artificial intelligence-based coaching system. I had to work closely with engineers and data scientists to understand how users used UP to meet their goals. We created hypotheses and defined interventions based on behavioral psychology. Then, I collaborated with a content strategist to develop features and content using the Smart Coach system. A few of my projects involved creating multi-day challenges to motivate people to log food, encouraging users to engage in step battles with the system, and contributing to a longer-term effort to create a curated program of features that could be proven to help users lose weight over time.