Mike Kaminsky

Company: SecurityScorecard, 2020

Role: Director of UX

Team: UX Designer, Visual Designer

Problem: I joined SecurityScorecard to help unify multiple designers working independently as servants to their engineering teams, without a cohesive design strategy or design system.

Solution: Over a 4 month period, my efforts focused on three major changes:

Culture - After joining, I created design sprints which ran ahead of engineering sprints. This included bi-weekly estimations of workloads and full team design reviews. This prompted a more open and honest design culture where designers could talk about areas they were working on, places they needed help, how we could begin to leverage common design patterns, and when particular projects might be best suited for different individuals based on skill sets to produce better deliverables.

Process - There were numerous process pain points that the team hadn’t addressed. Each designer used a unique set of tools making it all but impossible to share assets or design libraries and rapid prototyping was rarely embraced as a method of collecting feedback from users. I pushed the team to use Figma as a central tool for managing assets and prototypes since the team was fully remote and file sharing and version control using Sketch was prohibitive. The team also redefined how we conducted Agile PI planning so that we were able to estimate larger chunks of work with less up front resources or waterfall-type deliverables.

Design Systems - Working with a team of external designers, product managers and a customer feedback group I championed a new standardized set of designs to address elements of design debt that the platform had accumulated and worked with engineering leadership to plan for how this could be incorporated alongside typical production work.

In addition to these operational efforts, I led individual design efforts including: Revisiting the information architecture of the product based on product usage metrics, delivering an all new customer onboarding process based on feedback from 20+ customers, and conducting strategic user research for an advanced threat intelligence platform that had been incubated by the technology team.

The marketing home page for D3 was designed and built by our internal design and engineering teams. I led the team and oversaw the information architecture, content and development.

Visit the live site at www.datacubed.com

Company: Zebra Technologies, 2016

Role: UX Lead

Team: Visual Designer, Interaction Designer

Problem: Zebra needed to launch an updated version of their push-to-talk and messaging app that supported both Windows and Android.

Solution: This project went through several iterations of the design, visual language and overall implementation. The original project was designed in house, but had been developed by an external OEM with limited experience in building UI components, especially for their native Windows solution. After several failed implementation cycles, the decision was made to move the entire development in house.

Company: Zebra Technologies, 2015

Role: UX Lead

Team: Data Scientist, Product Manager

Problem: Zebra was looking for ways to create operational insights using data coming off of its fleet of devices.

Solution: I helped support the data science team with visual design guidance, as well as testing of prototype dashboards built using Tibco Spotfire as the charting engine. This information helped provide insights such as how many devices were being utilized, the predictive timing of when batteries or supplies would need to be re-ordered, and was the companies first analytics project. The overall tool had many UI limitations, but by defining guidelines we were able to ensure consistency for this and projects in the future.

Company: Zebra Technologies, 2014-2016

Role: UX Manager

Team: UX Designer, Visual Designer, External Design Agency

Problem: Zebra was faced with a unique challenge of trying to incubate a software middleware that could live in harmony with devices that typically only ran a single line of business app. The partner ecosystem of poorly designed, unintuitive applications became more of a pressing pain point as they simply tried to port legacy Windows applications over to our Android operating system, rather than taking advantages inherent in the new mobile devices.

Solution: Our entire UX team with support from contractors looked at how we could reinvent the developer experience for partners building on top of our devices, as well as how we could develop middleware applications that could offload more complex functionality (such as scanning, advanced keyboards, Push-To-Talk and messaging) to a consistent, Zebra branded experience rather than requiring all third parties to implement these functions on their own.

The key outputs of this six month long project included:

Leadership Buy In - Executive leaders agreed with the software architecture approach and invested additional resources into UX design and front end development resources to move the project forward.

Design System Foundations - This project created not only an internal design system, but external component libraries and style guides that partners could use to augment their development teams with design best practices.

10+ Roadmap Projects - The organization appetite for new software solutions was high and specific features were divided among individual product managers with UX acting as the central design hub for all of the projects.

Company: Zebra Technologies, 2016

Role: UX Lead

Team: UI Designer, 3D artist, external developers (Athlon)

Problem: Zebra needed a new way to showcase their innovative new TC8000 handheld computer with its unique upright screen form factor.

Solution: As UX lead working with an external development team, I helped create a working proof of concept that could be used at trade shows and conferences for showcasing how the TC8000 could be used to quickly scan and leverage augmented reality to provide rich interactions for store workers. The demo was built on top of Unity and Vuforia and utilized a 4’x8’ full size mockup to demonstrate in live events.

Company: Motorola Solutions, 2014

Role: UX Lead

Overview: This project was a series of self-motivated Virtual Reality concepts I created to demonstrate the disruptive potential of VR for Motorola Solutions leadership. The demos included:

-A Virtual Command Center, showing dozens of interactive videos over a city map.

-A virtual crime scene, showing the potential for LIDAR capture analysis of data after a crime.

-A Virtual Police car, showing the ability to pre-sell, and ergonomically test solutions prior to development.

These demonstrations went on to be shared with C-level leadership during a session of corporate innovation workshops where the company eventually made a strategic investment in an external company developing a similar application. Built and developed using Maya, Unity, C#.

Company: Motorola Solutions, 2014

Role: Senior Industrial Designer

Team: UX Designer, Human Factors Engineer, Design Research

Problem: Motorola was looking for a bar code scanner to fit a high end retail customer to help compete with products from Square and others.

Solution: The DS4800 features a rich physical UX with innovative features such as a glowing capacitive scan button, easy to hold form factor, and fully customizable sound schemes and graphical branding. I led the physical product development and oversaw UX including sound design, lighting behavior, and working with engineering within the constraints of the onboard microprocessor. I created a series of rich UX prototypes using Arduino and form factor development boards to compare user preferences for different types of trigger sensors, lighting patterns, and sound effects. This usability testing allowed us to narrow in on the final solution while optimizing costs and reducing unnecessary features. The DS4800 is utilized by high end customers including the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, Brooks Brothers and more, and has won 6 international design awards.

This project was an 8 hour design exercise based around creating a VR tool for teachers to memorize students names at the beginning of a school year. I brainstormed idea with my wife and other teachers in my family and then used a combination of 2D/3D and web prototyping tools to quickly mockup and visualize the concept as part of a hiring challenge.

A brief collection of other work samples from shorter or conceptual projects.