MISTY NICKLE

Company Mission

Aunt Bertha, Inc is a social impact company that strives to make human service program information (such as food, housing, and education) more accessible to those in need, by organizing the nation’s human service information into a searchable site. Aunt Bertha also helps human service organizations administer programs by offering free & paid web-based case management software.

My Role

2016 - 2018
User Research, User Interviews, Contextual Inquiry, Quantitative Research, Persona Creation, User Journey, Information Architecture, User App Flow, Wireframes, User Testing, Stakeholder Conversations, Collaboration, Project Management.

I was first hired by Aunt Bertha for a design research contract. After delivering insights, problem statements, and possible solutions for my research, Aunt Bertha realized that they had plenty of work to keep me busy as a full-time in-house UX Designer. During my two years at Aunt Bertha, that initial research served as the cornerstone for me in empathizing deeply with those users in need and always considering what affects any new features, tools, or overhauls might have on them.

Problem Statements

As an in-house UX Designer for 2 years, I tackled dozens of problems during my time at Aunt Bertha, constantly juggling the different perspectives of our uniquely varied user base, which ranged from people experiencing homelessness, to social workers serving them, to big insurance companies & community organizations utilizing our platform for government-funding tracking purposes.

Two clear company challenges became my specialty:

1. Prospective clients were not buying branding packages & features (i.e; how do we pay for all our staff?)

2. User data showed that people in need were not finding services (i.e.; we were failing our mission to connect people quickly!)

My Methodology

Insights & Solutions

Since our design team was limited to 2 full-time UX Designers and one VP of Product overseeing our work in a fast-paced agile environment, it meant a lot of solo design work, but our team made sure to always start the day with a standup, make time for small design reviews together, externalize as much as possible on shared whiteboards or foam core, and finish each week with high-fidelity design reviews.

INSIGHT 1: THE PROCESS OF CUSTOMER ACQUISITION is slow, inconsistent, and confusing for clients & internal AUNT BERTHA teams alike, creating distrust in the system.

1. Collaborating across all teams & touchpoints, I established a shared language & consistent offerings to create a cross-departmental form for acquiring new clients & configuration needs.

2. Observing team members in Sales, Customer Experience, Community, and even the CEO experiencing confusion while presenting our Demo sites, I updated the sites with clear visual cues & language, so prospective clients and internal teams could quickly see buy-in and navigate the main features in each tier.

3. With the help of clients and my work with our taxonomy, I became an expert in configurable features related to tagging and developed structure & process so anyone could efficiently step in to help.

4. I advocated for new features that would empower clients to help themselves, as well as free up time for Aunt Bertha staff to help clients where it was really needed. 

5. I served as the liaison with client stakeholders and led co-design sessions with Subject Matter Experts for new features with clients to increase client buy-in while also ensuring all user-needs were being addressed with empathy

Insight 2: Failpoints in several user journey flows caused challenges for users to connect with services and use features

1. Working closely with my UX Developer teammate, I advocated for major overhauls in the program listing page for such things as map relocation, filter functionality & visibility, and location algorithms.

2. I worked closely with the engineering team on a lengthy overhaul to our site’s basic search functionality to integrate with 3rd party search tool (Elasticsearch), ensuring all user scenarios were considered for the issues caused by misspellings and exact word searches

3. I established the Tagging Committee and bi-weekly meeting to review failpoints in current taxonomy hierarchy and created a process for adding, removing, and updating tags that made more sense to users and our internal data team.

Key Learnings

• The most successful projects were ones that crossed teams, creating collaboration instead of an Us vs Them mentality, shedding light on all angles of company & site problems, and increasing buy-in for advocating changes. I’ll never know if people truly understand all the work I did to build empathy across teams, but the fact that I still keep up with so many people across teams after I left surely implies that I had an impact.

• Always design for scalability. Starting scrappy has its drawbacks and recovering from basic foundational mis-steps can take a lot more time to overcome in the long-term than I suspect a lot of startups want to believe.

• Don’t underestimate the power of hand-drawing first. I’d often want to jump right in to digital tools because I had something in my head, but sketching it out first for obvious oversights can decrease so much time wasted on unnecessary visual elements.

Some Highlights

Testimonials