Siebel Center for DesignAs Design Strategist at the Siebel Center for Design, I led the user research effort behind the redesign of iMedia, the university's media platform intended to replace the aging Mediaspace system. My responsibility was to uncover the real pain points faculty and staff experienced day-to-day and translate those findings into concrete design requirements for the engineering team to build against.
I ran a multi-phase research process—interviews, concept testing, and usability testing—with faculty and staff users. This uncovered two major friction points: search functionality relied on users knowing exact file names, and uploading new media required going through IT for approval, creating unnecessary delays. I translated these findings into specific, actionable design requirements: tag-based search to make content discoverable without exact file names, and self-serve upload permissions to remove the IT bottleneck. I packaged these into a prioritized requirements document and presented it directly to the engineering team, then continued collaborating with them through weekly working sessions to refine the design flows as development progressed.
While the platform is still in rollout, early usability testing has already validated the impact of the redesign: task completion time for uploads dropped by 40%, and 9 out of 10 faculty testers rated the new tag-based search as "much easier" than the legacy Mediaspace search. Engineering also estimates that the self-serve upload feature will reduce IT ticket volume by 25% once fully deployed—turning research insights into measurable efficiency gains for both end users and the IT support team.</description>
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