Portfolio of Joe Yelochan

Having deep empathy for a specific group of people is key to addressing user's needs, and creating useful solutions. Understanding the people you are designing for will help to uncover their lifeworld, and will reveal the problem space that needs to be addressed.

Sketching is thinking. Sketching is collaborative. Sketching is expressive. Whether I'm sketching out thumbnail ideas on post-its, or sketching an entire UI in detail on a whiteboard, this is always the fastest and easiest form of expression when coming up with new ideas and concepts.

Artifacts we design affect the lifeworlds of the people who use them. Understanding systems and eco-systems in companies, in nature, and even in culture, is key to creating successful designs that will positively impact people, society, and organizations.

Sketching is often something that happens either in the moment or reflectively. This could be before, after, or during a conversation with teammates, business, or other stakeholders. Sketching out ideas, and expressing them on paper or a whiteboard is a collaborative way to bring an idea to life, and often serves as the spark from which new and innovative products are born.

Wireframes are an artifact that helps to digitize ideas or concepts, and often serves as the beginning of the fine tuning part of design iteration. I find that my first attempt at wireframing out concepts is rarely ever my last. Iteration happens early and often, and wireframes can help guide team discussions and visualize the UI and interaction design flows.

Good user research is the foundation of good design. Organizations big and small can be quick to make decisions about products with little or no insight from their users or customers. User research can help design teams, engineering teams, business, and even ceo level leadership to learn new and exciting insights, and empathy for the customers they serve.

Prototyping is a technique to quickly bring an idea to frutition, and to put it in front of an intended audience. Many dev teams do not have the time, patience, and resources for full-blown front end usability testing. Low fidelity paper prototyping is a way to rapidly bring a teams' ideas to life, and to quickly get feedback from users or customers through testing.

This internal web tool allows Nationwide employees to see how much time off they have stored in their "My Time" accounts. A seemingly simple idea, it became suprisingly complex very quickly. This is probably my most impactful design in my years of work at Nationwide, and has so far been well received by users, stakeholders, and the business client.

At a large organization such as Nationwide, customers access insurance services with numerous devices and with numerous forms of communication. Sometimes a customer will start in one channel, then 'jump' to another. In six months of user research, we uncovered happiness and pain, for both our employees and customers, in the NW cross-channel customer experience.

Insurance is complex and no one wants to deal with it. For this project we were asked to brainstorm and generate concepts for a tool that would help customers identify various types of insurance available to them based on their needs and lifestyle. After much sketching, discussion, iteration, and synthesis, we took the 3 best and showed them to customers.

Sometimes just telling a story is enough to give people a new perspective. This time, our team was trying to help business better understand the pain that Nationwide customers would go through when changing agents. What started out as just initial SME interviews and fun sketching eventually took shape as digital storyboards for part of our final report.

When Pfizer Inc. acquired Wyeth in 2009, a great deal of changes were abound on the horizon. Employees at both organizations would be challenged with the synthesis of systems and processes into one. This project was the design and development of interactive training for new Pfizer employees on the 'why' and 'how' of performing role-specific duties.

The primary job of bank associates is to help their customers. Often, changes will take place to customer's accounts, and customers are updated in the mail with various BOA letters. The (PPL) tool was designed to allow associates to search for product information, and perform on the job faster and more efficiently, for a better overall customer experience.

Unemployment is currently a significant problem for U.S. veterans returning home from overseas. Many of them were not well prepared for finding jobs as civilians. An alarming number of veterans are jobless. The final design was named the 'Job Beacon'. I wanted it to do just what the name implied--help guide its users to a job or career, and act as a beacon.

For this course project, we were to design an iPhone app for our clients, and make the application 'sticky', meaning, people would continue using it over time, and not quickly lose interest. This project wasn't about problem solving, it was about 'problem setting' and 'innovation'--two aspects that are very characteristic of design practice.

This was a project for the CHI 2009 Student Design Competition. Our goal was to design a device to be sustainable, and to support the utilization of local water supplies. Considering our user group, we wanted our design to allow water preservation with little or no effort on the part of our users.

This project lays out a theory for a design process model meant to inspire design of any company's physical work environment. How can the design of the physical work environment affect people in a way that can afford valuable and desired work performances/attitudes/motivation, etc.? Does your company's culture cultivate design, or hinder innovation?

This is a process map of a complex work task flow: an instructional consultant's (IC) client interactions at the Teaching and Learning Technologies Center at Indiana University, Bloomington labs. One of the main work tasks of the IC is to help clients solve any problems using or integrating learning technology into their university environments.

100 icons hand drawn with pencil, then retraced and colored in Adobe Illustrator. The theme of this collection of icons was "100 things you might find in a Japanese house." This project was a lot of hands on work as an intro to graphic design. I also put a lot of hours in learning how to use Illustrator. Knowing Photoshop served as quite an asset as well.