UI/UX Manager, Lead Designer, Product Manger, 2008-2015
Backstop Solutions
Backstop provides a suite of software solutions for alternative investment firms: Backstop CRM, Backstop Mobile, InvestorBridge (investor portal + CMS), Outlook and Excel applications. Backstop was the first cloud based solution in the space and has over 650 clients and 50,000 end users on its different systems. It currently tracks more than 2 trillion dollars in capital.
Backstop Mobile, Backstop CRM, InvestorBridge and the Evil J-Curve Robot.During my tenure I had the opportunity to thrive in a number of roles at Backstop which included professional services, marketing, sales, engineering, video production, and product management. This comprehensive experience strengthened my ability to align the UI/UX team's initiatives with the goals of the organization.
As the UI/UX manager I founded, hired and developed Backstop's UI/UX team while staying hands-on in all aspects of the design process for our software, websites, and mobile applications. I set project standards and timelines, as well as maintained interdepartmental relationships. I worked with my direct reports to establish career goals and verify productivity within weekly one-on-ones and monthly performance reviews.
Projects at Backstop
InvestorBridge
InvestorBridge is a CMS that hosts data and documents for hedge funds and their clients in a secure environment. The system gives firms the ability to manage their users and data in the Backstop CRM and import it directly into InvestorBridge to populate their website.
In 2008 I began building sites on InvestorBridge as a web designer. In 2011 I transitioned to a role as a Front End Developer on the engineering team and redesigned the user interface for the site's administration platform while learning RoR basics. In 2013 I took over product manager responsibilities for the platform while continuing to handle the front end dev work.
In 2014 I founded the UI/UX team at Backstop. It became apparent that the majority of InvestorBridge's functionality, implementation practices and key product knowledge were siloed within the design team. We spearheaded documentation and education initiatives for our company. In the process we streamlined the workflow with our professional services team on timeline, process and deliverables to provide a standardized implementation to our clients. We worked with our education department by documenting functionality in wikis, hosting education webinars and creating courses in LeanCore.
Backstop Mobile
Backstop Mobile is an extension of the Backstop CRM product. It provides on the go access to the core functionality of the platform. The project started as a dream between my CTO, an engineer and myself to revamp our tired Blackberry optimized mobile web service. I created the initial pitch deck that garnered attention for the project.
As the product designer I worked on wireframes, interaction design, user experience and design compositions for the application. I interfaced between internal stakeholders, product management, the scrum master, designers and engineers to bring out the final interface and interactions for the application. We facilitated continuous user feedback within our iterations using interactive Balsamiq wireframes, user testing and group forums. My final deliverables included redlined designs, native assets and a new SVG icon library for the hybrid portion of the application.
Backstop Marketing Website
In late 2013 the marketing team and I gained consensus to revamp our companies brand and social image. The process started by re-imagining our website from a content first perspective while giving our company a boutique design with a personal and accessible feel.
The redesign was very successful; within six months the site has doubled lead conversions, has a 90% increase in average time spent on the site, 30% increase in page views per session and lowered our bounce rate by 24%. We have taken the design ideals built into our website and incorporated them into our social media outlets, pitch decks and print materials.
The site uses InvestorBridge as our CMS and incorporates responsive design, parallax scrolling, vector graphics, marketing and product videos. I acted as front end engineer creating all of the templates, Sass, .js, and HTML for the site.
