General

Why we should work together

By July 8, 2018September 1st, 2020No Comments

You may be asking yourself this very question! So I thought, why not answer it (in a really general way at least).

We should work together..

  • because you belong to a group of people who work collaboratively and care about great UX.
  • you haven’t found a designer that hits the right level of intelligence, creativity and ability to get things done yet.
  • you work in a domain or have a problem that’s very tricky and/or very interesting.
  • you understand the need to create cross-functional collaboration to get great design done (you haven’t quite found someone who proactively collaborates with many personality types across different functional groups).
  • you’re excited about user-centred design and the idea of making evidence-based design choices.

My core strengths

I am a designer who:

  • can manage a lot of complexity and manage it very well
  • creates the appropriate level of design refinement during the design process (keeping costs reasonable)
  • really listens to what you say
  • excels in learning new environments/contexts (including highly technical concepts)
  • has a well tuned design intuition
  • has honed visual design using a methodical process
  • gets along exceptionally well with people (collaborating with developers, users and any team members)
  • has a healthy curiosity and ability to question/ test assumptions in a diplomatic way

 

What Collaborators have to say

I collect feedback on a regular basis from those I work with. These are some highlights I hope paint a picture of what it’s like to collaborate with me.

“She has a passion to really understand what the user pain points and needs. I think the best UI comes from those who are really committed to the end user not just pretty UI for the sake of UI and that is what Ceara does.”

— Jill Hesse, Product Manager, Genologics

“Ceara has had a very grounded and calming effect on our team. Her ability to take abstract concepts and root them in pragmatism has been so valuable in working in a high growth environment. She’s “easy to work with” because she has clear and positive habits for collaboration.”

— Hiba Ganta, Product Manager, E-180

“I solved many problems with Ceara. It was always ready to work with her and find middle ground that was great UX (due to her) and still manageable to develop.”

— Riley Mottus, Developer, Genologics

“Ceara’s greatest strength is her open- mindedness combined with her desire to quickly learn new (Dev) concepts. It’s been a pleasure collaborating on projects with Ceara. Her user-focussed approach has taught me a lot about UX.”

— Sameer Girn, Dev Team Lead, Genologics

“Ceara is a highly talented designer who is able to break down complex design challenges into elegant solutions. She is able to work well with engineering teams and quickly earn their respect. She knows the agile process and how to plan design work to fit within it. She’s also a skilled user researcher and knows many different tools to solicit useful customer input. She worked with and for me on very complicated scientific software as an interaction designer/user researcher and had to understand a very niche domain and translate it into easy-to-use software. On top of all this, she’s just a joy to work with and an easy personality for any team. I highly recommend Ceara!”

— Julie Baher, Senior VP UX, Illumina

“She can distill complex problems down to interactions that are easy to understand and use.”

— David Perrin, Senior Developer, Genologics