Nielsen Media Portal
For this project I was the lead designer responsible for creating a one-stop hub for accessing all of Nielsen's products.
The designs for this application could be sectioned into two main sections: First, we had the actual front-end for what the user sees when they login to the app. And then we also have to an admin application for a specific number of users who need to configure things in the app. This includes assigning users to apps, removing access rights, creating new users, etc.
Media Portal App Selector
The app selector screen was actually relatively simple. We just needed a page that shows a list of apps, probably in a card view that you can click on to launch that app in a new tab. There were also a number of things to consider like how many apps the user has access to, can they "favorite" an application, is there a way to see recent apps, etc. I also had to consider things like what screen sizes I should be designing for and what are accessibility needs for the app.
Through a number of iterations and testing with internal users, I came up with a finalized design for the app selector. Laying out all of my designs in a huge grid, so you could see the permutations of edge cases and user flows, I handed this portion off to development.
Portal Management
The other side of the app, Portal Management, was a lot more complicated. Since it is an internal Nielsen application, I'm not able to show actual designs of the screens, but the app mostly consisted of the CRUD (Create, Remove, Update, Delete) actions for Users, Applications, and Organizations, which was the structure we had in place at the time.
This part of the project consisted of a DEEP understanding of how our applications are put together from an information architecture standpoint, which I was able to learn during the process that UX design is not just about making things look pretty. You have to know exactly what sort of data your dealing with and what implications certain parts of the app have on each other.
When I finally got to a place where I thought I was ready to release the designs to the development team, I conducted several rounds of usability testing through usertesting.com, a new platform we were trying out at Nielsen at the time. Based on what I learned from the testing synopsis, I was able to make changes and finish my designs with more confidence that my flows were actually what the user needed.