Carte Blanche UX

I turned an abandoned office into a usability lab and Microsoft Teams into a screen-and-face recording rig, because Brooks Life Sciences had given me real creative freedom to build UX from nothing. It stood on its own even after leadership chose to buy rather than build.

Role:: Strategist
Dates:: 2019
Client:: Brooks Life Sciences

The Challenge

Brooks Life Sciences brought me in as their first UX hire with no existing processes, no practice, and no playbook. The project was already in motion. My job was to build the UX foundation from scratch while the work was happening around me.

Starting With Education

The first challenge wasn’t design. It was helping the organization understand what UX was and why it mattered. I’d been through this before. The pattern I’d learned: don’t just explain UX in a meeting, put it in writing. I created a UX Playbook, a document that explained what UX is and what it isn’t, outlined my three core principles, introduced my four-phase process, and gave the team a reference they could come back to. It also served as a credibility document. Here’s how I work, here’s why, and here’s what you can expect.

Working Within Existing Tools

One deliberate decision I made early was to work within the tools the company already used wherever possible. Introducing new software creates friction and slows adoption. Microsoft Forms for surveys, Microsoft Teams for recording, Airtable for the insights database. Free tools for anything outside that stack. The practice would be easier to sustain if it wasn’t dependent on a separate toolset nobody else used.

Feedback Channels

Within the first month I had two feedback channels running. A heuristic survey distributed via Microsoft Forms gave me a baseline read on how users perceived the existing system. A JotForm feedback form integrated with Airtable gave users an ongoing way to submit issues and observations. Both fed into the same database.

The UX Huddle

I established a quarterly readout I called the UX Huddle. Informal, optional, and focused on sharing what had been learned in the last quarter. It kept the practice visible and gave stakeholders a regular touchpoint without requiring them to be involved in the day-to-day work.

The Airtable Insights Database

Everything flowed into a single Airtable database. Interview recordings, transcriptions, survey responses, feedback form submissions, video clips. The database was the connective tissue of the practice. It meant findings were searchable, shareable, and didn’t live only in my head or my local files.

Job Shadowing

To understand the roles and jobs-to-be-done at Brooks, I started interviewing and shadowing users across the organization. Audio recordings were transcribed and logged into the Airtable database. For workflow-heavy sessions, I asked participants to join a Microsoft Teams meeting and share their screen so I could capture what they actually did, not just what they described.

The Usability Lab

My proudest accomplishment in establishing this practice was the usability lab. There was an old, abandoned office that few people knew about, a room inside another room. I moved a few things out, rearranged the furniture, and had a lab.

The setup was straightforward but effective. The participant sat at a PC running Chrome and Teams. I sat at a Mac running Teams. Before the participant entered the room, I joined the meeting from both computers and shared the PC screen. That gave me a simultaneous recording of the participant’s screen and their face. When they were ready, I started the recording from the Mac.

After each session, the video was available on Microsoft Stream where I could generate closed captions. Not perfectly accurate, but fast enough to make transcription practical. Videos and transcriptions were uploaded to the database.

The Heuristic Survey

Within the first month I distributed a heuristic survey through Microsoft Forms to get a baseline read on how users perceived the existing system. The results fed directly into the insights database alongside the interview findings.

Heuristic Evaluation Survey — Heuristic Survey in Microsoft Forms

The Feedback Form

I set up a JotForm feedback form integrated with Airtable to give users an ongoing way to flag issues and observations between formal research sessions. Passive feedback, always open, always logged.

The Insights Database

Everything landed in one place. Interview recordings, survey results, feedback submissions, video clips, transcriptions. The database made findings searchable and shareable, and connected evidence directly to the insights that came from it.

The Color Palette

The users of this software work in difficult environments, sometimes reading monitors from several feet away. That constraint shaped every color decision. I designed the palette for both light and dark mode, and validated every combination against WCAG 2 compliance standards before committing to anything.

CodeFreeze

I named the design system CodeFreeze, a nod to the bio-sample freezing at the core of Brooks’ business. It was built on Google Material UI and themed by me to fit the product. The stack was Angular and Material UI on the front end, and I already had a collection of Material components built in Sketch from previous work, which gave me a head start. I updated the files with the new color palette, extended the component library, and presented CodeFreeze to the team as the UI foundation for all future P1 modules, not just the first one.

Having CodeFreeze in place before user stories were written meant I could produce high fidelity mockups quickly as features were defined. It also meant developers had a reference that matched what I was handing off.

Prototyping

With CodeFreeze established and UX embedded into the story-writing process, prototyping became straightforward. I used Sketch’s integration with InVision to build clickable prototypes that stayed current with the design files through auto-sync. These prototypes were the primary artifact for usability testing sessions.

Creating clickable prototypes with hotspots in InVision

Brooks Life Sciences gave me genuine creative freedom and I used every bit of it. The playbook was written. The feedback channels were running. The usability lab was built. CodeFreeze was designed. The insights database was live. In under a year, the practice was fully operational.

The buy-not-build decision came from well above and had nothing to do with the work. Leadership acquired a company with an existing software suite and the project was wound down. The practice stood on its own through all of it.