Sarah Ann Jump

Design Researcher
Research 🔍Design 📐Storytelling 📚All 🫧
generative & Evaluative Research

Controlling Change

Recruitment Strategy
Activity-Based Interviews
Concept Testing
Co-Synthesis Facilitation

Company
Atlassian, a B2B SaaS maker of team collaboration software

Project Goal
Explore giving enterprise software admin more control over the change management process

Research Objectives
Learn admins’ motivations for wanting more control Understand the use cases and expectations for controls  Identify concerns, risks, and complexities

Deliverables
Recruitment strategy for enterprise customers Discussion guide Customer postcards Postcard framework & template Collaboration model with customer success teams

Cross-Functional Team
Product Designer Content Designer Product Manager Technical Account Managers Customer Success Managers Engineers

Impact
Stakeholder engagement throughout all phases of this study led to increased relationship building. Improved collaboration was noticed by the team’s leadership and influenced future project planning.

By involving Design and PM through open interviews, debriefs, and co-synthesis, the team felt confident making decisions efficiently. We were able to seamlessly move from the discovery interview phase to exploring solutions with concept testing.

The research insights were used to reevaluate the product roadmap to prioritize building the resulting features.

A new partnership with the customer success teams was formed to recruit enterprise research participants in influential roles from Atlassian’s top 1% of customers, careful to respect and maintain established account manager-customer relationships.

Fellow researchers expressed interest in the easy-to-digest customer postcards I created to share with my stakeholders, so I documented the framework and created a template to contribute to our organizational research socialization practices.

Customer postcards deliverable, detailed description below

Annotated postcard includes a participant’s quote from the interview (blurred for confidentiality). From: “Technology Leader, DC admin at a software company considering Cloud” and a note that explains it gives a bit of context about the participant while maintaining privacy. To: Trusted Change, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney, NSW, with a note that says “My team! They loved the Finding Nemo reference.” The other side of the postcard features a photo of a camper van driving on a road along the coast and a title that says “My Ideal Release Process”. A note points out a blurred participants quote describing why they selected this image during the interview activity to visualize their ideal process.

generative research

Risk Analyst Personas

Socialization Strategy
Participatory Design
In-Depth Interviews
Workshop Facilitation

Company
Interos, a B2B SaaS supply chain risk management platform

Project Goals
Understand our customers Alignment among teams Create a long lasting resource

Research Objectives
Understand the professionals’ motivations, processes, tools, challenges, needs, and stakeholders relationships

Deliverables
Visually-rich persona profiles Journey map Adaptable virtual workshop template Company-wide presentation Interactive poster mockup Employee engagement quiz Communication plan

Cross-Functional Team
Product Designer Graphic Designer Product Managers Customer Success Managers Subject Matter Experts Engineers

Impact
During the product and engineering team workshops I facilitated, we discussed how they would use the personas in their work. Responses included understanding user needs for specific upcoming features, writing product requirements based on user pain points, identifying new use cases, and prioritizing the evolution of features and enhancements.

One engineer said that the personas helped them to “understand how heavily the users rely on our platform for their sanity”.

Product leadership insisted that a persona field be added to their project management software so that with every task, team members were asked to identify and keep in mind the people they were developing for.

The personas were also incorporated into strategic planning use cases by Engineering and Product leadership.

Customer journey map deliverable, detailed description below

Annotated mockup of a visually-rich persona profile webpage includes a profile section, audio quotes, challenges & needs table, graph showing persona’s challenges by frequency and importance, a stakeholder matrix, a detailed journey map, and a section with all of the journey map details in a more legible, searchable format.

END-TO-END Research & DESIGN

Reimagining Worthi

In-Depth Interviews
Iterative Prototyping
Usability Testing
User Flow

Company
Citi Ventures, an innovation incubator promoting economy vitality

Project Goal
Redesign Worthi, a free web app, to be more useful in helping job seekers use workforce data to make informed career decisions

Deliverables
Research plan Discussion guide Participant screener Insights presentation Interactive visual report Ideation workshop Empathy maps User personas Customer journey map Competitive analysis User flow High-fidelity interactive Figma prototype

visual storytelling

Love Is Not A Memory

Documentary Photography
In-Depth Interviews
Ethnography
Artifact Analysis

Company
The Herald, a community newspaper featuring long-form stories

Project Goal
Promote empathy and understanding for people living with dementia and their caregivers

Deliverables
Front Page Story with 6-page spread Indiana University Words & Pictures Workshop Conference Presentations

Why is this in my user research portfolio?
This photo story, produced when I was a photojournalist, showcases my skills in empathic storytelling, building trust, in-depth interviewing, and observation documentation.

My hope is that by sharing this project, you will appreciate the challenging environment in which I spent years honing my instincts and can see how these skills are transferrable to research.

Service Design Strategy
Workshop Facilitation
Customer Interviews
Service Blueprint

Company
The Herald, a community newspaper featuring visually-driven stories known as Saturday Features

Business Problem
Print newspaper subscriptions were declining faster than the digital product’s audience and engagement were growing

Project Goal
Build on the Saturday Feature storytelling tradition to reach new audiences and create a sustainable digital workflow for the journalists involved in story production

Deliverables
Service blueprint  Service design strategy Email newsletter template Story template

information ARCHITECTURE redesign
Content Audit
Open Card Sort
Tree Testing

Hypothetical Client
The State of Alaska in 2020 🦠

Deliverables
Content audit Card sort similarity matrix Dendrogram Competitive analysis Sitemap with redesigned information architecture Wireframe

Project Goal
Redesign the information architecture of Alaska’s two state-published covid information websites, from the Governor’s Office and the Department of Health and Social Services, into one organized resource to better serve the residents and visitors of Alaska