https://www.ashtensmithux.com/contact daily 0.75 2025-05-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/565ea36d-7fe2-439d-9bf5-f7808d3e4db6/Frame+469+%281%29.png About Ashten (she/her) is currently based in Spokane, WA. She is inspired by new technologies, complicated problems and loves challenging her teammates to think big and to solve problems through a proactive, holistic lens. An experienced UX designer and researcher in the B2B SaaS space, qualitative research methods and iterative design are her specialty and passion. When designing, she has a track record of designing solutions that are evidence-based, achieve business outcomes and empower humans to live their best lives. She is also skilled in communicating user insights and behavior leading to successful generation and execution of product and design strategies. In her spare time you can find her: Refining her karaoke set list Testing recipes for a cookbook she may or may not publish one day Or of course, hanging out with her 19-year-old chihuahua, Lucy. https://www.ashtensmithux.com/new-page daily 1.0 2023-05-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/07f5f494-ad04-4202-95f9-29a526425156/ashten.png Home - Hi there! I’m Ashten (she/her), a senior product designer at Hubspot. A curious creature with a solid track record of helping companies and customers achieve their goals with purpose built products. https://www.ashtensmithux.com/utility-management daily 0.75 2024-07-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/33b40c6e-c22d-4bbb-8d91-ac863b9896b0/moscow_2.png utility management Day three, we did a MoSCoW activity where each team member weighed in on the what they believed to be the most impactful solutions and which assumptions they wanted to flesh out more and test. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/1636595519277-B9BLJ4EBVM41HNELVS3S/desktop-with-flowers.png utility management - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/1634674252629-0PN6LZ0LGMODPDB5EDF8/pendo_2.jpg utility management - Make it stand out I believe that there is always secondary research somewhere, whether it be from stakeholders themselves or a treasure trove of insights stored in a research repository. This project was no exception to that belief. I started by looking at the behavioral data we had in Pendo, looking for relationships and patterns that might be relevant to Utility Management. I then explored the idea that customers have probably been sharing feedback through their service rep. Turns out, they were and these conversations or cases were already logged in Salesforce, but no one had done any analysis on them yet. This, combined with what we learned from the generative research project I completed, a snippet of which can be viewed here gave me an understanding of the baseline of the product’s perceived value, customer sentiment and surfaced some opportunities to deliver value. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/46f6b893-ff87-4a39-9d80-698cf33d0033/6-2.png utility management Day one, I presented all of this research in a slide deck and gave space for everyone to ask questions. The product manager and I also suggested some metrics to consider to track our progress: increased product engagement, decreased number of Salesforce cases and a decrease in the number of resident utility charges that get reversed in our system. We then gave the team the rest of the day to ideate and diverge on the following opportunity: how might we support our user’s need to understand how charges are calculated so that they can easily support their residents? Day two, everyone got to present designs and give each other feedback. I encouraged everyone to have a “yes, and” mentality and avoid dismissing any ideas. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/c68aa1c9-4aa3-4ec1-802b-e4924e36a97b/Slide+69.jpg utility management - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/55790ee6-d24b-4994-bc39-8eb7798e2c15/Slide+68.jpg utility management I shared my changes with engineering and product. Our director of engineering was also present and one very crucial piece of feedback was shared at this time around level of effort that would have impacted development time significantly and it became clear to me that we needed to change the design approach. I also realized that the designs I presented would likely increase the user’s cognitive load. In other words, we would just be adding more junk to the junk drawer if we moved forward with any of the current designs. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/bd96d27e-99ed-418d-8e07-d50e609da69e/Slide+70.jpg utility management - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/1635389171762-ZBC6U79Y00VMOEKTICLO/pendoafter.jpg utility management - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/e2d65e46-9e9c-43b6-96ae-60456ddc6b64/PMF+over+time.jpg utility management Our leading indicators proved to be informative as we completed development and wrapped up our second round of product market fit survey analysis for the year, going from 33% to 41% fit. This was a huge milestone for the business line as it was the first time we had ever reached that benchmark successfully. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/ca4413e0-7da9-4cd7-ae51-1141ffc989b2/Screen-Recording-2021-12-16-at-7.gif utility management - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.ashtensmithux.com/design daily 0.75 2025-05-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/890553c7-7e91-491d-925d-1b83d37c7064/PMOF+hero.png Design - HubSpot Stored Payment Methods Get paid on time, on your terms. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/cc303311-c9d2-4e15-a8ee-fda7dec66e70/Frame+2.png Design - AppFolio Resident Page Redesign A data-driven approach to reducing a user’s cognitive load on AppFolio’s most visited page. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/1636595519277-B9BLJ4EBVM41HNELVS3S/desktop-with-flowers.png Design - Appfolio Utility Management Fully integrated software that automates the frustrating, time-consuming process of managing utility billing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/b44e3797-0c12-4738-9a15-c9f4eb1190ae/blur+leasing+mock.png Design - Failing Fast in Online Leasing A story of how my team maintained an iterative approach to keep learning, growing and delivering value. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/e848dfcf-33f6-48e5-a53f-f10e7cfa9087/Frame+471.png Design - Jetty (Internal Tooling) Coming Soon! https://www.ashtensmithux.com/projects daily 0.75 2022-06-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/60b87c40-2421-4dda-a5c7-16f67a3e2545/Slide+48.png Research - B2B Product Opportunity Research Methods: Survey + Interviews + Secondary Research Analysis Research Type: Generative + Strategic Role: UX Lead https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/57a1d528-63cb-468c-ba9b-10cf01531ce3/Slide+51.png Research - Bringing human insights to a business-centric strategy Methods: Remote Contextual Inquiries + Qualitative Survey + Design Studio + Prototype Testing Research Type: Generative + Evaluative Role: UX Lead https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/2cebdd0a-2eaf-43e8-b02e-8e008bad72b3/Slide+50.png Research - Assumption Testing for Product Development Coming Soon! https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/d463c1a4-909a-4559-b597-01928dc403df/Slide+49.png Research - Foundational B2C User Research Coming Soon! https://www.ashtensmithux.com/resident-page daily 0.75 2024-07-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/9503422e-bcca-493c-b0cd-d35db38875a0/OP+Project+Final.png Resident Page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/a31a4bb8-fd59-4e50-9490-03be4b62c0bf/Frame+472+%281%29.png Resident Page During periods of high growth at a company, it can be challenging to ensure that a product maintains its ease of use. High growth usually means more features added. In a product that prides itself on being a system of record, more features often mean more screen real estate gets used up. The company was noticing that our lagging success indicators were trending down, particularly NPS and SUS scores. Meanwhile, our research team and data science team had begun to investigate adoption of features, new and old. And they stumbled upon an interesting pattern. Of the most visited/used pages in AppFolio, 80% of the features were used less than 1% of the time. A hypothesis was formed: Leadership believed that we could explore increasing our product’s ease of use by decreasing the user’s cognitive load on highly adopted pages. This insight was raised to design leadership and I was one of the few designers tasked with exploring how we might explore and test this idea. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/2ae31ce1-a70e-4464-a53a-6778be051f48/Frame+469+%282%29.png Resident Page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/2e9eb276-8636-4afb-9a44-c8925b66f5fc/Frame+466.jpg Resident Page - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/0d30da2c-0655-4104-bb60-ac6d8d8b466d/Frame+468.jpg Resident Page 82% increase in successfully adding a Note. Scrolling also decreased by 20% on this task. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/b5a862b7-2ede-4b3b-84d0-e88c78d25d97/Frame+467.jpg Resident Page 75% of participants successfully found the Emergency Contact. For this very same task, 42% of customers failed this task in the current design. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/179650a8-8bb8-4b32-86a3-2b1d5e3da71c/2+Data.png Resident Page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/c5dfe130-3c8e-493a-851e-f07864107f1b/Preliminary+Design+B.png Resident Page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/433ac27d-149c-4512-83f5-c0f27aa11509/3+Data.png Resident Page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/b3c3b865-dd7f-4d22-a93f-49a2048f0122/Preliminary+Design+C.png Resident Page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/929b3f6d-c42a-47dd-a6bb-4e005914eab1/4+Data.png Resident Page https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/a80f47d9-7901-434e-921e-9277c248a114/Preliminary+Design+A.png Resident Page https://www.ashtensmithux.com/claims daily 0.75 2022-10-03 https://www.ashtensmithux.com/coaching daily 0.75 2022-10-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/07f5f494-ad04-4202-95f9-29a526425156/ashten.png https://www.ashtensmithux.com/stored-payment-methods daily 0.75 2025-05-12 https://www.ashtensmithux.com/storedpaymentmethods daily 0.75 2025-05-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/8677f29c-ef05-4ff7-8ebf-77a2a9d3716f/Companies.png Stored Payment Methods From there, I validated the primary use cases through user interviews, capturing more qualitative data to fill out the entire picture. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/a2140f04-12d5-4e32-b590-97467c473e85/Tags+and+counts.png Stored Payment Methods - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/f20efc87-4226-4c7e-b567-c7ab2e4bc4f5/Steps.png Stored Payment Methods - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/1f4e6306-8039-4278-947a-49558c2221ba/Exploration.png Stored Payment Methods - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/397565e4-087f-4657-b8ae-f3d5e67b17e8/PMOF+hero.png Stored Payment Methods - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/9d4592f2-a5a6-476d-b482-4c89bff25c44/Tags+and+counts+%281%29.png Stored Payment Methods - Step 3: Analyze data After these interviews, I went back through the transcripts and tagged the primary themes of the calls, triangulating my insights across the interviews and previous customer feedback. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/2abbe9d5-deeb-4ed7-ba98-ce46f0165e86/CARD.png Stored Payment Methods - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/de1d7ec9-b363-4d0a-88b9-8736bf1b043f/PMOF+hero.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/c848caff-e5ea-41bd-965b-434a4fa57484/graph+2.png Stored Payment Methods - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/616df3edbceca362c9dad328/ff593d8f-6ea3-4cc6-9564-cebc5dfc5f98/graph+1.png Stored Payment Methods - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.