My career journey

I have worked in the UX field for over 6 years. I started as a temporary research assistant at my previous company in 2016 on a 6-month contract, which was later extended to 12 months, after which I was officially hired full-time. During this time, my duties were logistical - I identified suitable participants for the study by ensuring their product use and job title were part of our target research demographic. I screened them via phone or email, scheduled sessions for the researcher, took notes during sessions, and managed financial incentives for participants. Eventually, I was promoted to associate UX Researcher, and my role matured.

As an associate UX researcher, I conducted research for the product teams. For GoToMeeting, we worked on redesigning the meeting interface, which involved the mute/unmute/screen share/webcam buttons, attendee lists, and chat panel. I conducted usability testing, heatmap click testing, and preference testing. For GoToWebinar, we investigated how marketers use webinars in the inbound marketing process, which involved ethnographic interviews with marketers about their day-to-day, the tools they use, how they advertise and track attendance for inbound marketing webinars, and how they follow up with attendees to find qualified leads to sell their products. This project evolved into a webinar-based video-sharing platform called GoToStage, where marketers could upload recordings and get leads from their webinars outside of live events. Additionally, we were working on a new type of webinar called Simulated Live or SimuLive webinars, where the webinar was pre-recorded but would seem to the attendee that it was live by including the ability to ask questions in real-time.

Later, I moved to the customer care team. Customer care is cross-product but divided into business units, focused on the product functions. GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar were part of what we called Unified Collaboration and Communication. We also had remote support products (GoToMyPC and GoToAssist) in the Remote Support Group. Care agents were trained to specialize in one of the subject areas. When I joined the care team, there was little insight into the volume of different issues that customers would call in about. This was because agents were responsible for self-reporting and categorizing calls, but they were required to take less than 30 seconds between calls and had little time to accurately document inbound call reasons. It was impossible for product teams to identify common issues, bugs, or feature requests that came in through care calls. I developed a program where I conducted issue-gathering workshops with tier-one care agents from both product groups to identify call reasons from customers and had the agents rank them as simple or difficult to solve, and whether the issue could be self-serviced or required an agent to solve. Our goal was to reduce the number of calls going into support and direct users with simple self-service issues to the support website, which would save the customer time and the company money. At this time, we acquired a company called Bold360, which was a simulated chatbot that allowed users to type in questions, and the algorithm would return articles that could help the user before they decided to call the support line. We also began using a service called Clarabridge, which transcribes customer care calls and identifies the call reasons based on keywords spoken during the call. Our Clarabridge algorithm was built based on the issues that I gathered during my workshops with care agents.

After another reorganization, I joined the Identity team. The Common Identity team works to establish user identities across products so that users only needed one email and password to access all the products in our suite. At the time the Identity team supported GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, GoToTraining, GoToAssist, and OpenVoice. These products relied on the common identity system to store the user data and allow them access to the specific products and licenses that they had purchased. The other important portal owned by identity was the Admin Center. This Admin Center also worked with the previously mentioned products and allowed administrators to onboard and offboard users and adjust company-wide and individual user settings (such as companies that for legal reasons do not want their employees to be able to record meetings). During my time on the identity team, I helped design the user flow for scheduled reporting, where admins could set a cadence for reports to be delivered on product usage (number of meetings or webinars per month, minutes on meetings, etc). I implemented weekly customer listening sessions, where I would select customer care call recordings and conduct a group listening session with the engineers to get direct access to customer voices. These sessions led to deeper empathy for user issues and helped fuel our backlog with bugs discovered during call listening. I also managed our customer feedback program by implementing Customer Effort Score questionnaires in Admin Center. This measure allowed us to track overall ease of use and monitor changes to the user experience over time. I would run quarterly deep dive analyses into the scores and verbatims, breaking down the scores by account size and product use.

We acquired the company Jive during this time, which has been rebranded as GoToConnect. This was a particular challenge as we worked to integrate older Jive customers into our common identity system. Jive had allowed users to set usernames that were not email addresses, and so we went through a large migration process of converting users to email-based user names and merging their existing GoToMeeting accounts with their Jive/G2C accounts. We were also tasked with creating a new admin center that combined the functionality of phone system management with the user management of the legacy admin center. This was a complicated process that involved a lot of research and design efforts.

I have worked with a wide variety of products with a variety of different team structures. Product teams were structured with a centralized UX org of researchers and designers who would pick up projects based on availability which were vetted first by a UX manager. On the Customer Care team, I was in a group of 4 individuals, including a project manager, a designer, and a senior researcher. The identity team was segmented from other areas of the business and consisted of a product manager, a designer, a team of engineers, and myself as a dedicated research resource.