darin duvall - ux design leader

delivering positive results with low-turnover, high-impact design teams

UX Leadership

At one point, the design organization at USAA suffered from 40% attrition. During the five years I managed the P&C Auto Design team, nobody from my team left the company. I created a safe environment for designers to push the envelope and I had their backs when they needed it. I led by example - building relationships with stakeholders, mentoring designers across the org, presenting workshops on career growth, leading craft teams that allowed designers to flex their design muscles, contributing to design systems, participating in team game nights and hosting team building events at my farm in Dripping Springs.

Auto Insurance Quote Improvement

When I joined USAA, they had the longest on-line auto insurance quote experience in the industry. I led a team that used analytics and user-testing to inform a redesign that resulted in one of the fastest quotes in the industry, reducing time-on-task from 15 minutes to less than 5 minutes.

Design System Contributions

When the USAA Marketing team rolled out new branding on USAA.com, the Design System team scrambled to update the design system for our transactional pages. My team worked exclusively in the transactional space, so we stepped up and designed, tested and contributed new patterns to the DLS that supported improved experiences for Auto, Renter, and Homeowner quote flows.

IBM Cloud Portfolio

I managed four teams designing products for IBM Cloud: Compute, Storage, Networks, and Security. IBM was seven years behind AWS in the Cloud Infrastructure space. We leveraged a new design system and delivered 16 quality IAAS products in one year. Filling gaps in the IBM Cloud portfolio helped us retain legacy IBM customers who otherwise would have gone to AWS or Google.

Streamlined Process

I introduced Agile to my four teams and worked with IT leaders to reduce development timelines and improve UI quality by having Front End Developers from my design teams check in code. This was the first time anyone from a Design team was allowed access to the repository.

Design Thinking Workshops Drive Results

After demonstrating how Design Thinking exercises can help business partners make better decisions - faster, I was invited to lead an effort to develop new content for industry sales decks. This facilitated the IBM sales force shift from IT managers to business leaders as the primary contact for Cloud Sales efforts. Once the content was locked down, my team developed collateral for sales decks.

Customer Journey Maps Drive Quality

When IBM was playing catch-up with AWS, product owners often rushed bad experiences into production. My team worked with users to generate customer journey maps which were used to grade and rank products from worst to best user experience. These artifacts informed product roadmap strategies and resulted in improved experiences across the IBM IAAS portfolio.

Personas Drive World Class Experience

Polycom’s dedicated telepresence rooms deliver an unparalleled experience with superior spatial audio and “eye-contact” with participants at remote locations. Many customer site visits and user tests drove the design and features of a new generation of telepresence suites on new hardware and software platforms.

Mobile Experience Tailored to the Product

When Crizal wanted to differentiate their lens coatings, my team toured the facility that coats the lenses to better understand what makes the product unique, (including smudge resistance). User research told us that smudges are among the top frustrations for people who wear glasses, so we highlighted ease of cleaning on the brand’s website.

Managing Remote Teams

During my tenure as Head of Design at Polycom, I built and managed teams in Texas, California, India and China to support multiple product lines in the telepresence space. Part of my charge was to build a common design culture across organizations that joined Polycom through acquisitions.

Managed UX team in Singapore

  • Established the Design discipline for the Imaging team at Dell’s Singapore studio during a one-year on-site assignment

  • Worked on-site with manufacturing partners across Europe and Asia to deliver best-in-class user experiences on personal, small business and enterprise imaging products

  • Designed an award winning control panel for multi-function printers

  • Was awarded a patent for simplified, reduced-button design of control panel

  • Drove the user experience requirements for three generations of enterprise imaging products

  • Made design decisions to reduce support costs and improve customer satisfaction

Contact me.

darin.duvall@gmail.com
Bastrop, TX