Coburn Hawk

Director of User Experience & Product Design

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Introduction & Case Studies

About Me

• Design Team Leadership
• 15+ years managing UX/Product Design teams with up to 11 Designers in my reporting structure. Managed both full time and contract resources.
• Authored career ladders, and created efficient hiring processes.
• Built User Research practices from the ground up.
• Focus on delivering premium experiences, strategic solutions, inclusive culture, mentorship, and process development.
• Design Thinking Applied
• Experience leading multiple Design Workshops for NBC, Smartmatic, Lootcrate, and Magento.
• Delivered fully accessible designs (sight, hearing, cognitive, and motor impairment) for NBC Streaming Apps, Magento Commerce, and the Los Angeles Voting system.
• Highlighted Projects
• Integrated all NBC Sports content into the existing NBC entertainment app for a successful stream of the Super Bowl and the Olympics.
• Lead Experience Designer on the 2020 launch of the new voting system for Los Angeles County.
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Design & Delivery Process

Designing Teams

That Design the Future

• First Director of UX ever hired by Lootcrate.
• Built a team from scratch then grew team to 4 UX designers and 2 graphic designers.
• Focus: UX Design for Subscription, Product Design (both Physical & Digital products), User Research.
• Launched User Testing practice from ground up, coordinated with marketing leadership on strategy.

• Lead User Experience Designer for new LA County Voting System.
• Led focused team of 3 designers to deliver on a immovable deadline (the election of 2020)
• Focus: UX Design for Voting, Accessibility for voters with disabilities, User Research and validation.
• Partnered with development to deliver the most secure and accessible voting system yet built.

• Director of User Experience and Design for NBC Universal.
• Began with a team of 4 that grew to 11, built vibrant design culture over three years.
• Focus: UX Design and IA for Streaming service, Application Design supporting 12 platforms including mobile, desktop and OTT.
• Launched User Research & Insights practice.

• First Director of UX ever hired by Magento.
• Hired on a team of 7, built design culture over four years.
• Focus: UX Design for Commerce, Information Architecture, User Research, Strategy
• Launched true Agile process for designers, built User Testing practice from ground up, created Design Systems.

Case Study: NBC Universal

Integration of NBC Sports & Entertainment Content

The Challenge

Bringing NBC Sports content on to an Entertainment based streaming platform

In 2021, NBC decided to sunset the NBC Sports website as a primary streaming destination and bring all the video content on to the NBC App. ��My team was accountable for the NBC App on 12 separate platforms (Android, iOs, Roku, FireTV, TVOS, and more) and was tasked with several challenges:

• Auditing the huge ingest of NBC Sports streaming content that would be coming from a Web centric model and tech stack.�
• Matching the visual treatment of Sports & Entertainment content as well as syncing different sets of metadata into one unified system.
• Designing navigation for both avid Sports Fans and our existing Entertainment Fans to discover content, especially when pivoting.

Strategic Design Challenges

NBC Sports and Entertainment together

Forge One Team from two: 6 designers from NBC Sports had been folded into my team as part of this re-org of Sports.

Present sports and entertainment content on the NBC Streaming platform without conflict of design patterns or metadata.

Design navigation between sports and entertainment content that was both seamless and allowed for discovery.����

All of this had to complete in preparation for the streaming of 2022 Superbowl LV1 and the 2022 Winter Olympics in Bejing.

Hosted design collaboration workshops with the NBC Sports designers in Connecticut and designers heading up entertainment content in Los Angeles.��I leveraged the tribal knowledge of the sports designers while introducing them to the expertise we had in multiplatform support.��These sessions produced wireframes, mock-ups, prototypes, and a new unified Team.

High Fidelity Wireframes

Concept Design

Prototyping & User Testing

• Created research strategy and testing plan for both qualitative and quantitative user tests.�
• Created design comps & prototypes used to conduct qualitative user tests using multiple User Testing platforms.

• Key takeaways from user testing:
• Casual sports fans have very different view preferences and goals than the Avid Sports fans.�
• Users prefer having multiple entry points to sports content (team, league, sport, etc.)�
• Date filters are vital for sports content.

Sports Content rolls out on Platform

The rollout of integrated sports content on the NBC app was in stages.��Sports specific landing experiences within the detailed date filtering users had asked for rolled out first.��There was also an updated design system that supported the countless matchup graphics.��Super Bowl LVI and the 2022 Beijing Olympic streamed with great success.

Beyond the Launch

League Pages (concept)

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Beyond the Launch

Team Pages (concept)

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Case Study: Voting Solutions for All People

Smartmatic - LA County Voting System

The Voting Solutions for All People (VSAP) project was commissioned by the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/ County Clerk to directly upgrade an aging voting system for one of the largest and most complex electorates in the country. VSAP is a publicly owned voting system conceived and designed with all voters in mind.

Voting in Los Angeles County

Replacing an old voting system stretched to the breaking point

• Actualize conceptual designs from IDEO working for Smartmatic, an industry expert on voting systems.�
• Build an onsite hardware/software integration lab.�
• Implement a full Agile Framework for design deliveries.�
• Prototype & design voting workflows that were secure, understandable, and accessible to disabled voters.�
• Design backend systems for County election workers to administer the Ballot Marking Devices.�
• Deliver a software voting solution installed on 35,000 new voting machines in time for March 2020 primary.

The Challenge

Making a New Voting System in LA County a Reality

Requirements

A voting solution for ALL people

• Support 13 Languages on screen and through audio.

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• 100% AAA WCAG Compliance to support color blindness.

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• All copy must understandable at a sixth-grade reading level.

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• High and low contrast modes, audio only via a headset and tactile controller, plus the ability to use assistive technology devices for those without use of limbs.

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• Minimal animation (due to tablet video card support) and minimal use of color (to eradicate bias)��
• 6.5 million registered voters over 4700 square miles.

Designing & Prototyping

Multiple workflows, use cases, many screens

Design Systems

Components used in both Voter and Election Worker experiences

Testing & Validation

Certification of the solution

• Once all the software was developed and loaded on to the finished hardware, the hard work of testing and validating the system began.
• Every aspect of the voter experience had to be tested from usability to accessibility. �
• Backend processes such as integrations and ballot counting had to be validated. �
• Unexpected challenges came up in high volume testing related to humidity and static electricity with often quick modifications made to solve the issues.�
• As the small army of QA testers pushed the machines to the limits, the User Experience team was there to provide the assets and solutions to clear every hurdle.�
• In addition to voter/user testing, the entire end-to-end system needed to be be validated as to meet the highly stringent California certification standards, which it met in December, 2019.

Primary Deliverables

Now in Service

Voter Experience - Ballot Marking Device�

• Ballot Marking Device (BMD) design, audit, and implementation in March 2020.
• Meets strict requirements of California Voting System Standards (CVSS).
• Audit, Gap analysis, and design for use cases that weren’t considered in conceptual design.
• User interface solutions that supported 13 languages.�

Election Worker Experience - Admin�

• Complete diagnostic interface for warehouse hardware testing.
• Election Management Platform UX for securely loading election data at warehouse.
• Election worker experience and interface design for opening and closing polls at a Vote Center.

Election Outcomes

A Long Term Solution for Los Angeles

“We can now say, with confidence that the voting model we’ve adopted in L.A. County is sustainable. From a 95-year-old voter to a generation Z voter and everything in between, the system worked as it was designed and it got overwhelmingly positive reviews in its utility and in the intuitive ease of its use.”

- Dean Logan, Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk

Maxine Waters and Dean Logan

Los Angeles Major, Karen Bass 2024

Ballot Marking Device in Vote Center 2022

Thank You