techspatula.com portfolio of Ruth McAfee
UX / content / interaction design
techspatula.com is the portfolio of Sydney based UX, content, and interaction designer, Ruth McAfee
- Projects
- Case studies
- Resume
- Contact
14 Gordon Street
Petersham NSW 2049
email: ruth@techspatula.com
www.techspatula.com
au.linkedin.com/in/ruthmm
March 2022 – present:
Telstra
Delivering customer experience enhancements in the authenticated and omnichannel flows of telstra.com. Interpreting complex and often highly nuanced business requirements as intuitive digital interactions for humans to use, no matter who they are or how they got there. Supporting, and leading across multiple missions in UX, design strategy, process, and management, research methodology, design systems, and content.
August 2021 – February 2022:
Sitback UX Design & Web Development Agency
Leading the scoping and delivery of UX research and insights through to fully realised information architecture, service blueprinting, remote workshop design and facilitation, wireframes and associated documentation for a diverse range of customers.
Customers included:
Dept. of Education - Learner profile discovery
Dept. of Customer Service - OneCX website consolidation – customer research and IA
Dept. of Education - Out-of-classroom learning discovery
Esri Australia for Brisbane CC - Flood awareness maps discovery
June – July 2021:
ARQ Group
Remote consulting role to define a UX strategy during the discovery phase of a large project.
January 2021 - March 2021:
NSW Dept. of Customer Service
A challenging transformation project conducting and calibrating research, to bring about user-centred change that satisfies business objectives. Streamlining the information architecture to incorporate simplified yet diverse customer journeys, re-designing content, validating opportunities, communicating change, and championing delight, I work in a small agile team and regularly present research findings and recommendations for next steps to the wider team as well as stakeholders.
November 2018 - May 2020:
pega.com
I use human centred design (HCD) techniques (includng workshop facilitation, and user research) to build empathy, evaluate requirements, explore opportunities and find innovative solutions. Clients’ business strategies, their customer’s journeys, and the people our clients hire, differ widely within their similarities. Pega software powers business in the areas of customer relationship management, digital process automation, and business process management. A specialist consultant to cross-functional client and Pega led agile teams, I have assisted with solutions for banking, government, telecommunications, and retail.
June - September 2018:
sapientrazorfish.com
3 month consultant role with Sydney University, as part of a wider website upgrade, to simplify the legacy IA of their faculty websites from a customer perspective. Dropping-in as phase I (proof of concept) rolled into phase II (MVP) production, I was responsible for continuity of research, authenticity of findings, documentation, and promoting compliant, consistent content design across faculty templates.
April - June 2018:
hosthavas.com.au
3 month consultant role for the upgrade of business.gov.au to identify and create a set of interchangeable components (using atomic principles of design) with documented purpose and application within page patterns. Page patterns use structured content and logical user defined pathways to improve readability, and usability across the site.
April 2016 – March 2018:
syfte.com.au (startup aquired by Designit in 2018)
syfte were a Human Centred Design consultancy specialising in UX research, interaction design, content and experience strategy, and participatory design. As a senior member of a small team, I facilitated in a variety of workshops and projects.
I led proof of concept (PoC) research into the requirements for interaction, conversation and service design of virtual assistants (or chatbots). Wrote the content strategy, and dialogue for a natural language conversational chatbot, and designed and built PoC natural language chatbots for testing and discovery with humans using both Google's DialogFlow and IBM's Watson Assistant cloud technology to power AI and machine-learning.
Before this I was consulting in UX for the Commonwealth Bank of Australia's one.cba intranet project. Across product design, my role straddled both editing and consumable interfaces, in content architecture, UX and occasional UI design. One.cba is a completely new, innovative way of connecting internal teams. Democratic and flat in structure, it integrates angular JS for a bespoke fully customised and stylish front-end UI with a SharePoint backend.
On behalf of syfte, I published the following blogs
February 2015 - March 2016
dxlab.sl.nsw.gov.au
The Digital Experience Lab was newly formed along with this role. Conceived as a collaborative, innovation hub for technology, experimentation and research to ignite and engage with new ways of experiencing the library’s digital archive. The lab is a fast paced agile working environment, with an emphasis on discovery and visualisation.
Highlights include
Responsibilities
August 2007 - 2009, August 2010 - February 2015:
Working in digital marketing our team was responsible for sydney.com, visitnsw.com, vividsydney.com getconnected.dnsw.com.au and 17 international sites.
Continuous innovation and collaboration across multiple disciplines including UX and design has returned YOY growth of greater than 50% 2011-2014, with sydney.com ranking 6th most frequented Australian tourism website* attracting 1.5 million unique visits every month.
I used specialised front and back-end software applications for graphic design, prototyping, wireframes, coding, code management, source control, debugging, cross browser and device testing, usability and accessibility testing, analytics, documentation, reporting, and sharing.
Highlights
Responsibilities include
April 2005 - August 2007:
Responsibilities included maintenance, administration and development of all LexisNexis Australia and New Zealand websites, intranets, and bulk email.
Reporting to head office in Dayton Ohio, I helped develop and test user scenarios/test cases at the UAT stage of the new LexisNexis online global platform.
Wrote documentation to support and train over 40 non-technical content editors spread across the Asia-Pacific region.
2004 - April 2005:
CreativEngine (now Bluearc)
Responsibilities included design and development of new webpages, email templates, and graphics; editing and updating legacy sites; liaising with clients; testing and bug-fixing. Larger clients
include: Clearasil
for Men, Willoughby
Council, Spinners, Brandenburg
Orchestra, Galderma - Treat skin Cancer, BlueScope Steel, PowerSponsorship.
2003 - Present:
I provide end-to-end web solutions from to IA and UX, to UI and front-end development, DNS and hosting services.
For work 100% my own, consider this portfolio, lizaforeman.co.nz, matrix nine, Varsity Travel, Peter Vernon Architects, White-Box Architects, Airlie House B&B, Essential Care Services, and Exploration Solutions.
I have contracted for Telstra Mobile via XM-Asia, Nutrimetics, Digital Wranglers, Liquorice Asia Pacific, and CreativEngine.
2002 - 2003:
LiquidVision (startup)
Responsibilities included pitching concepts and art direction, webpage and interaction
design (including flash), html and javascript editing. Clients include, Freedom, Revlon,
Merck Sharp & Dohme, OFM Investment Group, Actil.
2001:
MarchFIRST (now defunct)
Director's Assistant and Production Artist for sites including
Dentsu, Visa.com, the 2001 San
Francisco International Film Festival and start-up charity littlekidsrock.org.
Nielsen Norman Group UX Certificate
Certification DateAug 2017 – Present License 1018838:
IBM Build Chatbots with Watson Conversation
IBM Bluemix Essentials
IBM Watson Conversation Service Foundations
SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY (USA) Multimedia Studies Program: September 1999 - August 2001
completed "Certificate in Internet Design and Technology". Awarded Robert Bell Outstanding Achievement Award 2001
WELLINGTON POLYTECHNIC DESIGN SCHOOL (New Zealand)
awarded "Diploma of Textile Design".
IBM Watson, HTML, CSS, XHTML, DHTML, XML, JavaScript, jQuery, JSON, AJAX, GA, GTM, GitHub, Sass, ASP, VBScript, Python, Processing, PHP, Responsive design, Bootstrap, Foundation, IBM Cloud, CLI
Sketch, Adobe Creative Suite, Axure, UX Pin, Balsamic, Sublime Text,
Google Drive, MS Office, Confluence, Jira
various CMS (most recently including Drupal, Wordpress and Squiz Matrix),
Windows XP, Macintosh OSX
Organic gardening, travel, technology, music, and fitness.
*According to Hitwise web statistics for 2014