My skills
In addition to my extensive service design & strategy experience, problem definition and synthesis are two of my major skills. I can quickly explore a wide territory to help the team frame the problem we’re trying to solve, and ensure that no factors are overlooked.
Synthesis of user interviews
Using a digital prototype to solicit preferences and attitudes from car owners who share their cars on Getaround
Leading a workshop with customer service, operations, product management, and design to prioritize roadmap items
I’ve designed and researched under many conditions, from scrappy guerrilla projects and sprints to extensive research projects with dozens of participants. At Getaround, I supported product squads and collaborated with cross-functional teams like customer service, finance, real estate, pricing, and operations. I’ve used the insights I developed to reduce the risk in a new pricing policy, deprioritize a complicated and expensive feature the team was going to build, and to develop both the mobile app wireframes and the product policies for an all-new cleaning service for our users. I also hosted a Google Ventures Design Sprint to help kickstart new design work on the renter experience. Said one lead engineer, “Andrea and her collaborators are the only ones I’ve seen that are looking at these complex flows and identifying the areas of breakdown where, if it’s not a broken page, engineers won’t even find out.”
At Adaptive Path, I taught service design & design strategy methods, hosted journey mapping and blueprinting workshops to explore user motivations and needs, and synthesized secondary research to make use of other teams’ work. At Fitbit, I worked under a Lean UX model, working side by side with a developer to design and test iterations weekly, moving from low-fidelity mock-ups to high-fidelity visual designs over the course of about two months.
Quickly iterating and testing a new service experience
Leading a workshop with the Small Business division of Capital One to help map and simplify outbound customer interactions.
Interviewing low-income customers in their homes about their relationship to credit for Capital One’s U.K. division
I’m naturally very detail-oriented and have cultivated my skills in big-picture, systemic thinking during my career, starting in grad school at Carnegie Mellon, and then at Adaptive Path and Getaround, and now at Splunk.
I’m interested in designing with and for users who have complicated workflows—I’ve worked with analysts to help them utilize big data and on investing and finance experiences in both the B2B and B2C contexts, for example.
I’m highly collaborative. I love being part of a team and working with other researchers and designers as well as people from all different functions. I have experience planning and leading cross-functional workshops, including the five-day GV Design Sprint for a team at Getaround that I single-handedly planned, executed, and facilitated.
Teaching design methods to our colleagues in the business
Day three of our Google Ventures Design Sprint
Using ideation cards to solicit design concepts from an engineer focused on internal tools
My service design background
My extensive service design experience helps me incorporate stakeholders from disparate parts of the company into my research (including workshops), which helps me understand the big picture and ensures that whatever is ultimately built by the product and engineering team will be successful. I am used to serving stakeholders from outside Product & Engineering in addition to the PMs and engineers I work closely with day-to-day.
Because of all the “internal networking” I do to understand the problem space, I get up to speed very fast and quickly become an authority on what is happening around the company. This has been helpful to other researchers and designers on my team!
Introducing service design methods into the research process (above, a service blueprint, to be used as an artifact in conducting research with people from different functions).
Embedding with a kaizen team visiting Getaround from Toyota’s Japan HQ to see how operational efficiency intersects with the user experience for both customers and employees.
Speaking at California College of the Arts about research methods
Three years in customer experience consulting gave me a business background that some of my design peers lack. Working at a small startup has given me an even better bird’s eye view into how the work of various teams affects the business’s success and profitability.
Working with others
I love talking to people and maintaining my relationships is important to me. This makes it easy for me get to know people across functions at my company. I’m also community-oriented: I like contributing to company culture by participating in professional development activities, both internally and by representing my company at public meetups. I like participating in critique to help others on the team get feedback and offer advice when I can.
Mentoring others inside and outside my company is important to me as well. At Adaptive Path, I ran the summer internship program, hiring interns for my team and other service design teams. Because Getaround was a hyper-growth company, I participated in almost 100 design, research, and engineering interviews. At Splunk, I mentored our user research intern who was ultimately given a return offer and continues to work at Splunk today.
My other interests
Leading a modern architecture walking tour in downtown San Francisco
Outside of work, I serve on the board of a non-profit organization focused on modern architecture. Modern architecture was my entry point into a career in design—in college, I was interested in the way architects like Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier sought to create buildings that could guide human behavior in a positive way. I was especially curious about why these architectural experiments were, more often than not, unsuccessful. I wondered if today's designers were trying to achieve these unmet goals using more effective methods.
I realized that interaction designers and design researchers were shaping technology in much the same way that architects shape the built environment. Almost every product or service today includes a human-computer interaction of some sort, making designing for interactions a rich field of inquiry.
Get in touch!
Email me at adfineman at gmail dot com or send me a message via LinkedIn.
Download my resume here.