At the time of my employment as a contractor, Charter Communications was the second largest telecom company in the US. I was brought in to lead the design effort and to provide the UX for a brand new, greenfield portal for enterprise customers to use to manage their services. This portal, called Spectrumenterprise.net, was to be built using Agile principles and Lean UX, something Charter has had little experience with. The Enterprise team needed my experience in these areas to help the new project managers learn the process.

For this project, I led the design effort that included guiding UI, Content, and Accessibility teams. I worked with three product owners and led workshops and sketching sessions to determine the UX for each portal feature.

In the beginning we were not allowed to interview users. Despite repeated offers for creative ways to connect with customers, our stakeholders would not budge. So we did our best to leverage internal knowledge, customer service representative information, and our professional experience to make the best experience we could.

Another challenge for us was that we were requested to help guide our Product Owners in building an MVP product, so during our innovation sessions we had to work hard to pare down each feature.

This project required significant design leadership due to the distributed nature of the design resources, Product Owners in new roles and having never practiced the Agile process or Lean UX, and a product team having little experience in UX. However, the team was sharp and learned fast and we all joined together to overcome challenges and bonded to produce great work.

We decided at the beginning of the project to support full accessibility and full mobile. Our goal was to offer everything that the desktop product offered in as close to the same experience as possible across both accessible and mobile platforms.