Mariah G.

Challenge I arrived at Thimble in early December of 2020, jumping into a fast-moving environment with a large list of projects on the docket. The first task was a project to redesign a high traffic product page. We were dealing with a clunky WYSIWYG Wordpress build that was built quickly and quite rickety. Results Identified need for a design system from both a design and engineering perspective, designed and collaborated with engineers on an MVP system, including a family interaction animations. This increased go-live time across the project from design to dev creating overrides on each element and QAing pages that were always different from one another. This also created bloat on the site with multiple style sheets needing to load on different pages. The site was built on Wordpress and used Elementor as a page builder. I steered the move away from Elementor as a way to both protect the design system, as a number of agencies would be building pages, to increase page speed and reduce bloat on the site. After going live with the first templates in ACF, those pages saw a 32% increase in performance, 1.5 second decrease in time to LCP (largest contentful paint) and a reduction to 0 seconds total blocking time. Once the design system was in place, I solved for some core user experience issues and designed a new product page template, including adding the ability for a user to get a quote on page for their policy. This project was tested through an A/B test that redirected 50% of the traffic to the new design and measured CTA click rate, bounce rate and transactions. After the test ran for 24 days, we saw a 13% increase in CTA clicks and a 2% increase in transactions. This template design was then applied to the remaining product pages and tested again to verify results.

When I joined Mission Lane the brand, growth, and acquisitions space had unclear ownership and no dedicated marketing or brand designers. This meant that product designers were begrudgingly designing social posts, emails and the like. I was hired as a player-coach manager to wrangle our house of brands (at the time there were 4 distinct ML products), manage a new hire marketing designer, the design system designer, and act as IC in the acquisitions experience. I worked to build trust with tough stakeholders and improve the design process with the business folks. By the end of my time at Mission Lane I had run several large scale optimization projects including one that drove a 10% increase in conversion (application submission) and a 34 second reduction in time to submit. These updates amounted to a $10 million increase in annualized revenue. Contributions: Product, web design, brand, marketing, growth, design system design