Overview
I helped The Active Network build the largest UX team in San Diego, staffing a team and designing a beautiful new studio in LaJolla. What began as a push towards design excellence ended with a tripling of shareholder value, and subsequent acquisition by a private investment group for $1 billion dollars
Throughout, I've helped transform useful services into usable and desirable products. Today our designs are touching millions of lives every day with improved experiences, reduced support costs and optimized conversion rates.
I helped conceive of Wannado, a product that connected latent demand with supply
Opportunity
If you've registered for something online, chances are it was with Active. Organizers setup had been offered as a service; you call you Account Manager to do it. But that's neither scalable nor offers the self-service control customers demand. Our role was to craft effective experiences for both Registrar and Registrant.
Our products posed an Innovator's Dilemma. Despite our deep feature-sets, competitors began to chip away with more compelling offerings that were more desirable and usable.
Active recognized that investing in world-class UX was a strategic priority. We built a global team and gave them a work-environment that facilitated creativity and collaboration.
My SketchUp render of the new studio
UX Scorecards
UX Maturity Model
UX Process
As Design Manager, I implemented key frameworks like a UX Maturity Model and user-centered design process.
Mode Map
Framing tools like this Mode Map helped Active to better identify and focus on customer-backed opportunities.
Conference attendee app using an activity-feed pattern (with Brian Mizrahi)
As our team matured, we started producing world-class products, like this social app for our new Smart Events Cloud business.
At Active, we lived the culture, including training and competing together at the Solana Beach Triathlon.
In 2012 I helped conceive of and design Wannado.com, an innovative service that matched demand with Active's supply of events. A notable innovation was our Event Canvas, which allowed you to easily create a great looking event page using a hybrid visual and form-based editor.
Results
Active had a successful, $1 Billion dollar IPO in 2011, and was subsequently acquired.
Today 1/5th of the US population uses Active to register for the events they love.
