Khoa D. Pham

Problem: How might we make design management fit a foundational discipline in traditional business culture?

Research: Discovered the major stakeholders from hiring managers in businesses to students in design school and conducted interviews and brainstorming sessions.

From here I created journey maps and unraveled the gaps in the system beginning with education all the way to execution and importance of design within traditional business culture.

Several ideas were developed and then tested with stakeholders for their feedback.

Solution: Developed a new product that addressed the lifecycle of design management and helped students and businesses connect earlier in the typical career path. This allowed students access to mentorship and important connections. At the same time, it allowed companies to build a pipeline of design experts that will graduate into workforce better prepared to hit the ground running.
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Problem: In the old design, whenever there was something new, it would simply disguise it as a survey card and put it at the top of the feed. This was confusing to members, and very limited in usability.

Research: I set up a 5-second impression of a "Join the raffle" call-to-action and placed it in various touchpoints, then presented it to different sets of users then asked what they remembered. Afterwards I ranked all the locations and gave suggestions of the kinds of information that would be best placed in the respective spots.

Solution: In the new design, there is a designated space directing members to the next best action we think they should take based on their actions or state that we built into a logic engine. We also created a framework for determining the best location for new content and messaging based on how valuable it was for the member and its priority. This allowed us to spread messaging and content across different touchpoints in the app instead of just on top of the survey feed.

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Problem: Older adults are often seen as laggards in technology when they are the population that could benefit from it the most. So technology tends to disregard their needs.

Research: After interviewing hundreds of residents at over a dozen senior living communities we gathered their feedback and observations

Solution: We saw many levels of cognitive, social-economic, and physical issues to overcome. We worked on an interface and experience, that had large touch targets, high contrast, but also tremor detection and adaptation. We implemented multi-sensory system feedback because every resident had one or more sensory issues. We enabled adaptive lighting and dark mode because their rooms were usually very dark and glare became a worse problem due to various myopathies. We also made it very easy for them to keep in touch with their loved ones with simplified video call and chat controls to combat isolation. Later one we worked with Amazon and their Alexa branch to bring this experience to voice only.