👋 Hi, I'm Verónica Borges

I'm currently a Product Design Manager at Zocdoc, formerly at AltSchool and Yiftee. I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a B.S. in Computer Science and HCI. I love to build products that empower people and have spent the last 7+ years designing for education, healthcare and e-commerce.

Below are some highlights and key learnings 💡(or view full resume).

Zocdoc

Zocdoc’s mission is to make healthcare accessible to everyone. I have a player/coach role where I do individual design work, help shape our design team, and define product strategy.

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Shaping a design team: First time recruiting, hiring and managing. Established processes to foster healthy and effective collaboration across teams.

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Designing with data: Large existing user-base. Learned to use data to align design to business goals, find opportunities, prioritize based on impact, and a/b test.

👩‍💻🛠️ Contact me for recent work

👩‍💻🛠️ Contact me

AltSchool

AltSchool's mission is to use technology to transform k-12 education. I was the design lead of the cross-functional teams focused on teacher planning and student engagement.

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Cross-functional leadership: First time in a larger tech team. Learned to effectively communicate and collaborate to get feedback on work and align teams on new ideas.

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Improving core design skills: First time working with other designers. Helped me grow a lot as a designer, especially my storytelling, visual design and research skills.

Inbox

Assignments

Other Projects

Yiftee

Yiftee was a platform for gifting to local merchants. I was the first hire of startup and led several aspects of the product including research, design, iOS and front-end development.

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Doing what needs to be done: Learned to wear a million hats, context switch a lot, work fast, have grit, prioritize my time, and be scrappy as hell to get the job done.

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Building things: Launched iOS app as sole designer and developer. Did a lot of front-end web development. Learned what it takes to really build a product from scratch.

Yiftee Wallet

Other Projects

Assignments

Designed experience for creating, delivering and working on assignments.

Background

Teachers planned curriculum by creating assignments (called Cards) in Trello, copying them over to our platform using a custom Trello plugin, and then assigning them to students. The assignments had a different design for students, teachers and parents. I was initially tasked with standardizing cards across all our users. Right before we started the dev work, we decided as a company to get off Trello and support activity creation in our platform. I then extended the proposed designs to include creating and editing activities for teachers.

Goal: Improve and standardize assignments UI across all our users (students, teachers, parents) and allow teachers to create and edit assignments within our platform.
Team: Product manager, lead designer ✋, engineering manager, 5 engineers.

Success

This feature was launched as part of a complete redesign of our platform when we moved off Trello and into a fully functional ready-for-market product. We received very positive feedback from both educators and students on the new card designs. Success compounded based on the fact that teachers no longer needed to do the hacky "create in Trello and then move to the tool" flow.

Although it was a success, we did leave out some key features that we added post MVP, specifically re-ordering steps and questions, required sections for students, improving student documention workflow, and assigning to pre-defined groups of students.

" I'm now working on creating Cards for next year and its such a BEAUTIFUL experience. Thank you for all your amazing work. I can create cards all day!!!!

- Mitzi P. (Lower Elementary Educator)

" The new cards received a lot of positive, unsolicited feedback from returning students. Specifically, they love how when they open a card it takes up the whole screen and that they don't need to press the "do reflection" button in order to see the questions on the cards.

- Patrice G. (Upper Elementary Educator)

Final designs

Student assignment view

Assignment creation flow for teachers

Key learnings 💡

Pushing current models: I designed the structure of assignments when we were still creating the cards in Trello. I was constrained to have steps, questions, and work as separate sections. Looking back, I should've revisited the structure of the card when we decided to support activity creation ourselves and explored interweving the steps, questions, and work section as one.

Handling work capture: The new design still didn't solve capturing and attaching physical work to the assignments. It was cumbersome to take photos with the chromebooks. We solved this later on with a student capture app.

Gathering user needs

Students need to:

View cards assigned
Complete the task and attach their work
Communicate with teacher about the work

Teachers need to:

Create, edit and assign cards to students
Assess student work
Communicate with student about the work

Parents need to:

View children's work (in context)
View teacher's feedback for the work submitted

Auditing the different assignment views

We started by comparing the four different card views in the product and noting any inconsistencies between them. Some of these included the header/navigation layout, size of card view, main actions placement, cover photo placement, and activity feed styling.

Understanding how cards are used

We got feedback from teachers that assignment cards were not kid-friendly (small modal, buttons, text, etc.) and that they were hard to bulk edit for all assigned students.

To get a better understanding of the type of activities teachers were creating, we looked at card samples across our 5 schools.

We learned that the current structure of assignments was not flexible enough for the different types of activities. Some cards did not have any steps or attachments and ended up with a full blank slate on the respective panel. Also, the reflection section within cards was shown only after students turned in the card but most of the times the section was used as a quiz so it didn't make sense. Some other breakpoints can be seen in the artifact model below:

Proposed card structure

We took a step back from standardizing the cards and proposed a new, more flexible structure to the card view. We also wanted to separate out the different components that where currently within the activity feed in order to promote a linear workflow for students.

Early designs

We made a bunch of quick paper sketches, then refined and tested them.

Testing designs with real data

We grabbed some of the different types of cards we sampled before and tested out the new designs to make sure they were flexible enough.

Managing the different views

Assignment cards where used across the entire platform and all three users. We made a user flow to illustrate the different states of the card view. It was instrumental for engineers during development to keep track of the variations.

Final design for students

Card creation flow

As part of the second stage of this project, I designed the flow for teachers to create assignments on the tool. Below is the final prototype.

Assessment Inbox

Redesigned the tool for teachers to manage, view and assess student work.

Background

In the AltSchool platform, teachers can create assignments, deliver them to students, and assess (grade) them when done. We received a lot of feedback from educators that the current assessment tools were hard to use.

Goal: Understand what wasn't working in the assessment tools and improve it.
Team: Product manager, lead designer ✋, 3 engineers

Success

4 months later we shipped Inbox. Our redesign increased teacher satisfaction scores on the assessment tool by 29%, achieving the company's highest rated score.

" I used to have anxiety of not knowing how much work I needed to do because it was never clear how much work had been submitted. My brain defaulted to "I have an overwhelming amount to grade". Now with Inbox, there are still times I feel like that because I have a lot of work but when I only have four submitted assigmments, I know that I don't need to head to the coffee shop to do it... I can just hammer through it while my dinner is cooking. It's great. Thank you.

- James E. (Middle School Educator)

Final designs

Below is a video with the final designs for Inbox. We shipped this to 5 educators to get feedback, iterated on it, and then launched it to all our lab schools.

Key learnings 💡

Piloting new features: We didn't have enough volume for a/b testing (our tool was only for our own lab schools) and we could only ship large changes in between school semesters to avoid disrupting the classroom environment. This made releases big, hard and risky. During this project, we changed how we shipped features within the company-- involving engineers early in the project to release a pilot to 5 educators before full launch. It helped us get insights faster, test into changes, and trust the direction.

Handling offline work: Our group assessment tool helped teachers transcribe paper assessments to our platform. However, it was still a lot of duplicate work. We unfortunately didn't solve this problem within the scope of this project but did some brainstorming for later (think QR codes in paper).

Initial research

We looked back at previous research on our teacher's assessment workflow and created a framework for how and when they needed to see which information about assignments. The framework established an onion layer of information, where teachers started at a high-level view of what assignments needed their attention and then drilled down to a specific student's work on an assignment.

Analyzing the current tool

What worked:

Easily see state of each assignment per student
Easily assess each student's work for a specific assignment by clicking on a cell
Handle other group management operations like move, delete, and unassign

What didn't:

Hard to find what needs your attention in the high-level classroom view
Finding a specific assignment is cumbersome
No easy way to assess multiple students quickly in one assignment
Not all assignments are assigned to all students so grid breaks down

Mapping card (assignment) states

We layed out the different actions taken on assignments by both teachers and students at different points in time. We re-designed the states of a card to create a simpler assessment workflow by decoupling notifying students of feedback from approving cards.

Concept explorations

We made a bunch of quick paper sketches, then refined and tested them with 7 educators from different age levels.

Some of the insights we learned:

The ordered list Inbox interface was easier to scan and established order between the assignments.
While they liked the birds-eye view of how each student was doing for an assignment (top left image), it felt like an extra step.
Whithin an assignment, they wanted to go through all the submitted students first but still have the other students accessible so they wouldn't be forgotten.
When assessing multiple students at once for an assessment (bottom right image), they usually inputted the assessment by objective, not student first, so it would be easier to use if inverted.

Low fidelity designs

Final designs

Below is a video with the final designs for Inbox. We shipped this to 5 educators to get feedback, iterated on it, and then launched it to all our lab schools.

Yiftee Wallet

Redesigned and developed the iPhone app to focus on receiving and using gifts

Background

The existing Yiftee app was focused on sending a gift on-the-go. However, based on analytics and feedback from our customers, we noticed that most users used the app to redeem their gifts, not send. We decided to create the Yiftee Wallet, an app focused on viewing and using your gifts. We focused on making the experience seamless and beautiful to convert gift receivers into gift senders. Since this was a drastically different design than the previous version, we decided it was a good time to clean our codebase and completely redo it in Swift.

Goal: Redesign the Yiftee iPhone app to focus on the gift recipient experience
Team: Designer and developer ✋(solo project but with the support of my manager and product lead)

Final design

Success

The redesign was very well received by our users based on app ratings and user testing. I left the company briefly after it was launched.

Key learnings 💡

Web and mobile experience may serve different use cases: Our original iPhone app followed the same hierarchy, features and focus as our web experience (sending gifts vs. receiving). I learned to take a step back and think more deeply about how intent may change per platform.

Using standard UI patterns: I was still fairly junior, especially in visual design. My typography and spacing was messy and I created a lot of new patterns where it would have been best to rely on standard Apple guidelines and UI components.

Understanding the offline experience

We took a step back, and started the project by conducting contextual interviews on how people receive and use physical gift cards. This led us to a couple of insights:

Gift cards got lost in the back of wallets: The wallet was a great way to collect and carry all the user's payment options on-the-go. However, most gift cards were stored hidden in the back pockets of the wallet and users would forget they had them.

Remembering partial balance of gift cards is difficult: When reusing a gift card (that had partial balance left) users had to ask the cashier how much balance was left since there was no visual update of the current balance on the card itself.

Unwrapping a gift and using a gift are different experiences: People unwrap gifts and read the sender's message upon first opening it, but only wanted to carry the item afterwards. This led us to tweak our app's flow: We wanted the initial recipient experience to focus on the sender, message and gift information but for already opened gifts, we wanted them to focus on using the gift card. Our user could still go back to viewing the initial information but it was not front and center.

Re-doing the information architecture

We updated the user flow based on the insights above to include opening a new gift experience and landing on "My Gifts" view.

Collecting user feedback

Since our last major iPhone update a year before, we had collected tons of customer feedback and user testing on our application. Below are the main breakpoints in the existing app and how we solved it with the new design.

Problem: Linking a gift to an account was hard.
Solution: We added Deep Linking to our gift page so opening a new gift on the mobile phone would automatically open the app with the gift they just received. If the gift wasn't tied to their account it would do it for them.

Problem: Confirming a gift felt intimidating.
Solution: Confirming a gift was a technical requirement, so we brainstormed a couple of alternative interaction patterns (scratching the card, flipping the card to confirm, etc), tested them, and decided on the "hold-to-confirm" pattern.

Problem: Gifts were not accessible offline.
Solution: We cached opened gifts on the phone and allowed them to view the voucher offline.

Redesigning exchange gift flow

Problem: Exchange gift options were hard to navigate.
Solution: We added categories, sorting options, recent searches, and merchants in nearby locations.

Problem: We needed to support new merchants with multiple locations.
Solution: We changed the merchant view to show a list of nearby locations right there on the page, with the option to get directions, and infinitely load more.

Brainstorming & wireframes

Final designs

Creating a visually beautiful experience

One of the main objectives of the redesign was to make receiving a gift visually pleasing. We wanted the application to look and feel like you were accessing gift cards in your wallet. To do this, we created a couple of custom transitions between different views and really focused on the interaction design.

Design details

Clicking on a gift card would slide the card up of its pocket for more detail. The user would drag the card down back to its pocket.
The card flipped while loading the gift voucher, which eventually showed on the back-side of the card.
A brand new gift appeared wrapped at the top of the wallet. It jiggled to create a sense of anticipation. Opening it up would reveal a card with a message and gift card inside.
A bit of excitement was added to exchanging a gift with a big, bold message saying "Great Choice!"

Gift Recipient Design

Led Google's 5 Day Design Sprint to redesign our gift recipient experience

Overview

We wanted to reimagine the web gift redemption experience, tackling some of the issues we got feedback on in our post-redemption survey. I led the Yiftee team through Google Venture's 5-day Product Design Sprint. This sprint was perfect to go through the full collaborative design process 10x faster to launch a new experience with features such as: print view with instructions for cashier, donating and exchange features, messaging the giftor, and easily delivering the gift to your phone. After the redesign, 17% more gift recipients mentioned having a positive experience with Yiftee.

PayPerLess: Hackathon Winner

Designed and developed an iOS app to use Bitcoins at local merchants.

Overview

Our hackathon project was an iOS application to seamlessly use bitcoins at local merchants by converting them to giftcards on the fly. We had recently tried to use bitcoins at a local merchant (Coupa Cafe in Palo Alto) and were surprised by how cumbersome it was. We set out to design a better, easier experience. We were a team of 3 Yiftee coworkers and won the Money20/20 Hackathon. I led the iOS development and design.

Student Capture

Designed an iPad app for students to easily document their work

Overview

Students in our lab schools frequently capture photos of their work and attach them to assignments. However, our teachers and students reported it being a very cumbersome process in the Chromebook. Students had to flip the chromebook around to get the right angle and the photos were always low quality.

We set out to design an iPad app for the classroom, where students could quickly attach pictures to their assignments. It needed to be easy to use by young students and allow different students to use it without logging in each time.

Student Playlist Concepts

Designed concepts around opportunities for our student Playlist application

Overview

Students in our lab schools use a web app called Playlist to find and work on their assignments. We wanted to understand how it was working and what could be better. A researcher led interviews across our middle and upper elementary classess, both with teachers and students. Afterwards, we synthesized our findings, led a brainstorm with educators on key opportunities, and developed 5 concepts to test out. Below are the final concepts I created.

Two concepts tackling overwhelm...

How might we reduce psychological overwhelm when a student digests his workload? How might we mobilize him to easily prioritize what to work on?

Three concepts tackling motivation...

How might we signal (to educators and the student) that he has stalled out of the learning process? How might we re-engage him in the learning process?

Units

Designed experience for teachers to plan and deliver units

Overview

During the first two years of AltSchool, teachers would create assignments (called Cards) in Trello, copy them over to our platform using a custom Trello plugin, and then assign them to students. In 2016, we decided to get off Trello and support activity creation in our platform. This meant we needed a way for teachers to organize their activities into larger units of study. Thus, we set out to design Units, an easy way for teachers to plan and organize their curriculum.

We collaborated with the Pedagogy team to guide us in best practices for planning and made sure our design worked for all our users: teachers, students and parents. I was the lead designer in the cross-functional team of 8. Below are some highlights of the designs.