Hi, I’m Jaylyn
I love working with teams that include stakeholders, development resources, and end users to help find the balance between business goals, technology constraints, and the user’s needs.
I believe in being an advocate for the end users, which I do by listening to all the voices of a project team. By understanding everyone’s perspective I can better frame my advocacy for the end user and prioritize designs that meet their most impactful needs. Complex problems are my favorite types of problems inside and outside the office.
I’ve been consulting for most of my career (10+ yrs) which has allowed me to tackle design challenges from different industries and interact with lots of amazing people and personalities. I love being a part of a team working together to enhance the experience and capabilities of users.
My design philosophy is to make things simple and usable.
If I can’t explain a design simply to my team or stakeholders then I’m not fully understanding the project and need to take time to learn more.
Skills
Research
I have experience doing many different research activities and can create the testing plans, write the guides, conducted the interviews, facilitate the testing, and present the findings as a report or presentation.
Interviewing
Surveying
Observing
Personas
Presentations
Journey Mapping
Card Sorting
UI Design
Experience with many different software applications and have on-the-fly learned new ones as needed. I currently prefer designing in Sketch, Axure, or Adobe Xd, but I’ve also used draw.io, UXPin, Mural, and PowerPoint as needed.
Sketching
Wire-framing, Hi and Low Fidelity
White-boarding
Prototyping
Design Specifications
Style Guides
Web Design
I have experience both creating and modifying existing code, including HTML, CSS, JS, and JSON languages. I also have experience with jQuery and Bootstrap libraries.
Responsive Web Design
Troubleshooting
QA Testing
Dev Tools
Modifying Existing Code
Endorsements
“I applaud Jaylyn for her professionalism, her ability to confidently jump into complex project circumstance, and overcome very challenging obstacles. She applies solid user experience principles and methods and quickly learns new skills to support design objectives. As a user experience evangelist at Dish, Jaylyn skillfully assembled and presented a lunch-and-learn presentation for employees to demonstrate the ‘hows and whys’ of UX. From my professional perspective, Jaylyn Dawson would be a valuable asset to any user experience team and I hope to one day work with her again.”
“Jaylyn is a fantastic person, professional, and artist. She made great designs for our event. She is a delight to work with! She’s thorough, efficient, understanding, creative and absolutely always professional. She went above and beyond all our expectations. She is just an all around outstanding person and artist. I highly recommend Jaylyn and I am convinced that no matter her venture, she will always be successful.”
Process
I’ve worked primarily in Agile environments, but have also experienced Waterfall and that unique combo of Watergile / Agilefall.
I’ve also helped create a process (LEAD which can be found below) to better include design and help explain to clients what design activities might happen throughout the project.
LEAD Process:
Listen, explore, apply, deploy are supported by change enablement, quality assurance, business analytics, and project management.
General Process:
Upfront research followed by planning then cyclical design and feedback until the final product is delivered.
Blueprint Process:
Upfront planning then cyclical blueprinting, construction, and deployment and and then eventually optimized. Activities are supported by content, governance, collaboration, technology and infrastructure, user security and compliance, change enablement and user experience.
