United States

Product Design

UX Design

UI/ Visual Design

Design Operations

Interaction Design

Growth Design

UX Testing

UX Research

B.S.

Tim Rechin

Head of Product Design

Product strategy

Collaboration

Problem-solving

Organisation skills

Leadership

Design systems

User research

Product roadmap

ChatGPT

Facebook Ads

Figma

As classroom tools were becoming more common, we wanted to find ways to connect the 100m+ teachers, students, parents and administrators using our products. As the new design leader I was tasked with building the first design and research team and partnering with the VP of Product to drive a new education community strategy. 

The first initiative I took on was to redesign our mobile app which was out of date and had major usability issues. My team and I partnered with our district adoption team to conduct user research, worked with engineering team to understand constraints and opportunities, and conducted a mobile audit and analysis to create a design backlog. In redesigning the app, we introduced a new style guide and reduced the overall screen count by introducing native mobile patterns. 

Each year we plan around a major back to school release. Over that time my team redesigned our core education tools — assignments, quizzes, grading, documents, and classroom management, introduced new features such as chat, class agendas, partner brand pages, partner integrations, community feed, and education resource sharing. This work not only grew our district adoption and user engagement but was an important business driver. 

As businesses and schools were affected during COVID, we suddenly experienced a growth spike as distant learning became a necessity. Through our parent company, NetDragon, we entered into a partnership with the country of Egypt to deliver distance learning solutions for their entire country. Over four months my team worked to understand the needs of our international users and worked with our adoption and product teams to redesign or build new features to support 22+ million students and 1+ million teachers. This work coordinated in a successful nation-wide rollout of student testing across all grades.

Our Consumer Experience Group was exploring ways to appeal younger generations who were taking more ownership of their financial lives. As a lead product designer for Mint, I collaborated with user research and product leadership to define the overall product strategy as well as leading design for key product initiatives.

In redesigning the Mint.com registration, onboarding and homepage experiences, we applied an experiment-driven approach to address user activation and engagement problems. I designed onboarding variations for adding bank accounts, a critical step to generate quick financial insights. I co-led a redesign of the homepage where we added financial content, revamped our financial offers and introduce a new coaching module to guide money management tasks.

In partnership with Amex, I led the design direction for a money management mobile app to support the underbanked. I conducted surveys and interviews to understand how younger generations thought about and approached financial topics which I developed into product storyboards and concept designs. The project ended up being canceled due to a shift in our strategy.

As part of our growth strategy, we launched a new set of Credit Score products for web and mobile. I led the overall design for our web product, designing a dynamic education feature that helped users understand and manage their score. The successful launch of these products and the new engagement helped drive the growth of our credit monitoring and financial offers businesses.

Co-designed an insights app for executives to help them track key performance indicators (KPIs), access go-to-market (GTM) content, and communicate effectively. Lars Dalgaard demonstrated the app at the 2012 SAPPHIRE keynote, and it later evolved into a new customer insights product.

Collaborated with the Senior Vice President of Product to improve the product development process, allowing teams to work more efficiently. After conducting research to identify problems, I co-led an eight-week project to create a mobile app to help product teams share updates and stay coordinated throughout their projects. Working closely with a the Core HR team, we followed a weekly cycle to conduct research, develop designs, create quick prototypes, and test them with users. Despite ending, we defined success by what we learned as a team, demonstrating that a fast, iterative approach could be more effective than a traditional waterfall method.

As a senior designer, I worked closely with UED researchers, visual designers, content managers, and prototypers to support our Trust and Safety products, helping buyers and sellers conduct business safely. A major accomplishment was leading the successful redesign of the eBay Feedback System (aka Detailed Seller Ratings), which helped sellers differentiate themselves in the marketplace while giving buyers valuable information to inform buying decisions. In doing so, I worked with our seller community team to understand their problems and collect valuable design feedback. One of many highlights was collaborating with my research partner to conduct new experimental design research across four countries and thousands of users. Getting to review designs with Pierre Omidyar, eBay founder, was pretty cool too.

eLance was a digital services marketplace that linked buyers posting digital projects (like taxes and digital marketing) with vetted service providers globally. As a UI producer, I supported all parts of our marketplace, including registration, accounts, listings, billing, payments, education, and support. Eventually, I managed a small team of designers and UI engineers. Together, we helped lead a company transition into enterprise software, launching and growing our multi-product services procurement solution that helped enterprise companies manage their services spending.

As an interactive media specialist and founding member of the UC Davis Extension multimedia studio, I co-led design efforts in building distance learning campus website and digital learning products.  One of my highlights designing and producing an interactive orientation CD-ROM for incoming college students, for which I produced the digital video content.

Tim Rechin🇺🇸

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