Testimonials

DCP Midstream - Fortune 500 company in Denver, one of the largest natural gas processing companies in the U.S.

It's no easy thing to step into either a late-development project or a long-running team with an established dynamic. How about both at the same time? Such was Colette's unenviable task, and she carried it off brilliantly. 

Colette joined our team after we'd already cycled through two designers, leaving behind a hodgepodge of abandoned mockups, a hybrid application design reflecting disparate aesthetics, and various outstanding design questions. Her challenge? Unify those elements along with her own stylistic opinions, make all of it consistent with the organization-wide design system being simultaneously developed, and answer those outstanding questions despite a void of business context. 

About that void - our team had also lost our product owner, i.e. the official repository of all the contextual knowledge Colette needed to do her job. The rest of the team had collective knowledge gained through practice and over time, but such knowledge is inherently so baked-in and almost unconscious that it becomes difficult even to identify what needs to be communicated to a newcomer. Did I mention that another of Colette's tasks was to produce documentation to communicate such knowledge to a newcomer? 

Faced with this maelstrom, I would run away screaming, but Colette threw herself into all of it with zeal, and produced some remarkable work. Her updated UI breathed new life into the application while laying the UX groundwork for expanded functionality to drive new adoption, and her architectural and business-logic diagrams presented complexity in an accessible way. 

While design is not my area of expertise, I have some training, and this enabled the two of us to have many useful conversations bridging the design/development gap. I appreciated Colette's readiness to consider my feedback and consult me on feasibility of implementation. 

In sum, I commend Colette's ability to operate and provide great value within a great deal of uncertainty, and I recommend her highly; it was a pleasure working with her, and I'd be glad to do so again.