julie marquis
LIFE DESIGNER, ’16 MAGD ALUM
PERSONAL WORK
The personal piece I choose to show is a site dedicated to the idea of growth through mutual understanding. As a platform for socially and morally driven questions spurred from the recent controversies of the unrest in America, it
is meant to be a place for answers where some might feel to defensive to ask and others too emotional to answer. In the face of the truth that this site is useful to a minority, there is a secondary purpose intended for it – that people who feel they understand these issues can learn to, or enhance their ability to speak to others in a manner that is encouraging to friendly debate, empathy, and understanding.
This site is driven by the need of a neutral middle man, and so the build and language follow suit. You enter the site and have direct access to searching by keyword or browsing by category. When a question is selected, you are given an answer that is brief and blunt, but not pointed or judgmental. Resources will also be supplied for citation and educational purposes. The site is typographic and rests on visuals minimally. Determined to abide a neutral question and answer format, I chose to avoid color and keep the design simple. Focus should
only rest on the content itself. Due to this simplicity, a strict vertical rhythm is established. All nouns or adjectives are decisively gender or race free, unless the question outright speaks to a specific audience. Not only will the answers be worded by me, but the answers as well. In the few that I have collected for example purposes, I have found there to be an immediate need to strip needless words that support an angry or defenseless feel. Although both sides of the content will be crafted from lengthy resources of articles, social media posts, and interviews, I feel as though it still can be little more than an opinion site. I hope to discover a way to truly make it voice of the people.
PROFESSIONAL WORK:
SAP UPSCALE COMMERCE
At SAP Upscale Commerce, I work as a UX/UI designer in the building of our product: a platform that allows merchants to launch an omnichannel, AI-driven commerce experience in rapid time. My area of focus are the consumer-facing products; iOS and Android mobile native apps and a Progressive Web App
(PWA). I am responsible to research the needs of the consumers against competitive research, iteration, and user testing. Research and response are always in action as I continually communicate with my UX peers as well as across the department to find the solution that is engaging for the user while still pragmatic for us to build. Due to this process, I facilitate meetings to determine how the product will function and how it should look in achieving this, while communicating the needs of every team that will help in it’s build, as well as making sure it doesn’t place too much strain on any group in particular. Where our product is rapidly building and changing it is easy for features or design to lose it’s original purpose. To help combat this, UX engages in small scale Quality Assurance testing, as well as big-picture end-to-end testing. Where problems occur, the need is weighed and an adaptation or solution is
advised.
Since Upscale is early in it’s production, not much of it’s progress is open to a general audience. To have something to show, I chose a company-wide challenge I participated and won in. We were given the problem: How can we make the company Harley Davidson innovative, open their audience to younger generations, and grow their client base by 2 million?
There is a universal tone set when you think of Harley Davidson – old, leather-clad man on a big, loud bike. In order to change or add to that idea, the company has to offer a resource that aggressively breaks this stereotype. To build the
right product, I had to investigate Harley-Davidson’s current website and app. I
discovered key issues to solve, for example, online shopping not available for all locations and products, lightweight features broken into separate apps, and a dated visual design. I was able to revise and update their app with some of the capabilities of Upscale’s potential. Uniting their features, I created an app that
allowed the user to tend all of their goals in one location. Stripping the app of the highly localized limitations, I designed their abilities to a global level but still maintained their presence locally. This way we could hinge the introduction of AI
to deliver a highly personalized experience. Products and categories would also be
surfaced due to their location-based popularity and item bundles would be added to the experience in order to deliver a truly unique and updated feel.