Kristin Taylor

USAA

Lead Service Designer - contract

Led multiple workstreams that provided startegic service design support across various lines of business.

• Designed and facilitated milti-disciplinary workshops and co-creative protoyping sessions to make ambigous concepts tangible and actionable.
• Developed and documented service design methods to support USAA designers and guide discussions with business partners.
• Scoped and led research to understand target user need and define system requirements for multiple cross-functional workstreams.

City of Austin

Research & Service Design Lead

Led the research and service design team for the City of Austin. Manage talent acquisition, set team performance goals, and monitor outcomes. Source, evaluate, and determine project approvals. Gather human-centered information/feedback and facilitate cross-functional collaboration to optimize services, programs, and initiatives. Develop well-crafted research plans with clear research objectives.

• Build the Service Design team to support both city resident organizational needs.
• Direct program strategy, hiring, project intake and people management.
• Review, track, and lead scope for several high-profile projects.
• Facilitate workshops and deliver city-wide trainings and hold office hours to scale service design capacity across the organization.
• Manage stakeholder relationships—from C-suite to service delivery management teams.
• Procure digital tools to be used between cross-functional teams.
• Establish and document equitable principles and practices for resident facing research.

Mozilla

UX Designer

Solo product designer for Iris (an open source quality assurance testing tool). Led the end to end design--from scoping to product delivery. Presented at Mozilla All-Hands, shared progress at company wide open critique sessions and at open source product demos.

• Scoped design work based on desired outcomes, available resources and timeline.
• Participated in strategic conversations and used insights to guide team decision-making.
• Planned and implemented strategic qualitative and quantitative data collection techniques to conduct user and stakeholder research.
• Aligned designs to policies, infrastructure and system constraints.
• Documented design mock-up to increase development process for Eastern European time zone.

Austin Independent School District

MakerSpace Director & Facilitator

Built a program that encouraged creative problem-solving and “design thinking” for over 500 students. Researched methodologies and technologies to develop projects. Collaborated with cross-functional teams to target needs and learning/workshop objectives.

• Designed, led and scaled working sessions for grades 2-8 to engage students in hands-on learning, collaborative work, data driven problem solving and clear articulation of the solution and reasoning.
• Tripled grant funding by structuring quality design challenges that brought value to students.
• Tracked and documented outcomes for stakeholder evaluation.
• Monitored grant funding to ensure accurate review, updates, and documentation.

Freelance Web Designer / Studio Artist

As a Freelance UX & Service Designer, designed e-commerce websites and service delivery plans for eight small businesses. As Studio Artist, ran a successful art studio.

• Documented competitive analysis to map out leverage points.
• Researched and recorded insights of web design & service through heuristic analysis, end user & employee research to identify strategic changes to service design and delivery.
• Created journey maps, service blueprints, and artifacts to communicate current and ideal state of service.
• Used research data to improve website experience, business billing structures, service delivery plans and procure 3rd party digital tools.
• Tracked outcome metrics based on stakeholders needs.
• Also painted many pictures.