Andrew Otwell

Leading all UX for LabKey's products in big data management and workflow for life sciences.

• Design leadership & experience strategy for scientific lab inventory management and biologics development. I've introduced design thinking and methods at LabKey, including design sprints and experience visions.
• Responsible for the design and end-to-end experience of projects: user interviews,requirements and use case definition, workflow & information architecture, and detailed interaction design.
• Collaborate closely with team leads across LabKey to deliver new features and iteration on existing ones.
• Continuously working to bring a human-centric perspective to deeply technical products.

I led design for Zillow’s main search experiences, including the UX for a major industry compliance project, a multi-year cross-company effort at Zillow that impacted every user of the site’s search experiences.

Other contributions included:

• Running design workshops for cross-company efforts around home touring, including virtual touring. Led teams through new idea generation and prioritization, and also to create a strategic design concepts.
• A design brief I wrote on the future of search experiences at Zillow kicked off to a broad strategic investment into personalization. I led the design work for this project, including directing a cross-functional team to design and prototype personalized experiences.
• Created internal design tools, including a guide to UX Strategy at Zillow that teaches UX designers an approach to working strategically by analyzing four case studies from the company. I also wrote a guide for designers and Product Managers about how to create useful and compelling product principles.
During my first year at Zillow, I led UX design for the Zillow 3D Home product, an iOS tool for real estate agent and pro photographers to create 3D home tours.

At Google from 2013-2016, I worked on two enterprise software producs: DoubleClick Search, an SEM management tool typically used by large search marketing agencies; and Google Cloud Platform, a computing infrastructure for software developers and large companies building large-scale distributed software.

My contributions included:

• As a people manager, I recruited, hired, mentored, and coached junior and senior designers and user researchers, and helped three of my direct reports get promoted. I've also had to manage low performers, which was harder than that other stuff by far. I received a 94% postive rating from my direct reports in a Google manager's survey in 2015.
• I helped establish and update design processes for both teams, including running informal design critiques and day- to week-long design sprints, as well as approving final design work for production. Prototyping is a particular interest of mine, and I was one of a grassroots team that built an Angular.js-based prototyping framework used to create hundreds of prototypes at Google.
• Worked closely with product managers and engineering leaders to establish product visions, typically as mockups or functional prototypes. I've run numerous design sprints with busines and technical leads, both for "big bets" and small features. On DoubleClick Search, I also shipped a number of features as a Senior UX designer.

I've written more about my Google work here.

Between 2008-2011 I was the Senior UX Designer for Amazon's retail checkout experience. I led a major redesign of the Shopping Cart in 2010-11, one of the most-visited pages on the site. I'm most proud that this was design-driven project. It grew out of some blue-sky redesign work our design team had done where I'd built a live-data prototype in PHP that demonstrated a dramatically simpler Cart user interface and client-side list management actions.

The prototype here is the design I delivered to the engineering team. Note that the live Cart has been iterated on quite a bit by my design team since this version launched.

• Move all list management actions to the client, substantially reducing pageviews per session
• Simplified the overall UI, while adding key product information

Every purchase worldwide on Amazon.com, except 1-Click orders, goes through this page, but it hadn't been updated in years. My 2010 redesign focussed on clarifying the information heirarchy and laying the foundation to start moving secondary checkout interactions like address selection into lightweight modal states of this page.

• Reduced average time to checkout by improving page legibility and simplifying the most common interactions on the page.
• Reduced pageviews per purchase.

The Order Placement page handles a huge number of use cases. To manage that complexity, I built a custom prototyping framework that routed URLs to Javascript templates and loaded data from JSON objects. This let me cover new use cases by editing a couple of small text files rather than rebuilding dozens of Photoshop files. (This was before popular Javascript MVC frameworks like Backbone or Angular existed.)

The Payment Page was the first major project I worked on as Senior UX Designer for the Checkout program in 2009. This page lets customers create, validate, and choose from payment methods. As in the examples above, we worked to move common interactions to the client side, significantly reducing customers' time and effort. We were surprised to find that adding friction to a critical task led to increased success (can you spot where?). While the design is starting to show its age, I'm proud that this design has held up without major changes.

• Reduced per-customer error rate and average time-to-checkout
• Provided merchandising for Amazon's payment methods