Megan Lighty

Megan is a researcher, designer, and creative with a love for communication –

whether through curriculum design for middle-schoolers, expression through movement, or the translation of designs into functional specifications. While finding her own rhythm after a very product-oriented degree (Industrial Design), she found research, experience, and systems design to be her sweet spot. In these spaces, Megan is most excited by the relationship-building and information gathering. She seeks to challenge traditional norms of design and prioritize ethical and participatory practices.

Professionally,

Megan just finished a role with Johnson & Johnson designing digital tools for pharma field reps. In other UX roles, she's researched and designed products for life insurance, financial literacy, and banking. She's been a design facilitator for Publicolor, Better World by Design 2018, MIT IDDS, and IRC's Mahali Lab. Megan is currently centering projects that feel authentic to co-creative research and design in healthcare, education, and civic spaces.

Personally,

there are many "in progress" creative projects: researching the effects of movement practices on chronic pain, slowly mastering the practice of stone carving (thanks Ken!), and training in modern and contemporary dance.

UX research & UX, UI design / Johnson & Johnson

Advocating for user perspectives in the pharma space

A new internal data-driven tool that drives role efficiency by using predictive data to generate information about doctor’s offices’ well-being.
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Project highlights:
→ Successfully used our research as evidence to shift product requirements to align more with users’ needs
→ Collaborated with the dev team to design and build a product that fit within their existing system
→ Advocated to establish an independent Design function (what was previously merged with Product & Strategy)

* This project has restricted visual access. Please email meganmlighty@gmail.com if you'd like more information on the final deliverables of this project

qualitative interviews and user testing

How might we design a tool that helps users plan & identify proactive ways to engage with their offices?

Research objectives:
- Solidify understanding of current journey state
- Introduce the dashboard prototype
- Confirm that the right data is being surfaced

Methods:
- 12 interviews (1:1, 60 min) with:
          - Qualitative discussion
          - Moderated user testing
          - Ranking exercise

Participants:
- 6 FRAS Reps / 2 Supervisors
- Varying work experience levels
- Varying territory sizes

Examples of research materials (ranking exercise & test script)

research learnings

Shifting product requirements to accommodate user needs

We successfully used the research as evidence to shift product requirements to align with users’ needs.

Spreadsheet of data with identified patterns

R1 research insights

UX/UI design

Iterating to create data that’s intuitive

User testing helped inform the evolution of the page organization to establish better understanding of the new predictive data. I collaborated with our developers to find a design balance between the intended, user-centered, designs and the existing Veeva design system.

Final (abstracted) Territory Dashboard screen

Final (abstracted) Account Detail screen

impact

A Beta product built with the users in mind

Our engagement resulted in a product that included the data users needed, increased user representation through advocating and conducting four user research studies, a design system that balanced the existing and newly proposed system, and a new appreciation for the strength of research and design.

In our last moments with the project, we collaborated with the Content function to launch Beta feedback surveys. In addition, I pushed for a small user testing study to help us understand the usability of the tool and the “whys” of the survey responses. It helped us prep the team for future versions and confirmed that we were on the right track with usability.

digital experience design, healthcare, qualitative research, usability testing

April 2022 - December 2022

Lead UX Researcher & Lead UX/UI Designer (in a design team of 3)

Field Reimbursement and Account Specialists (FRAS) – assist doctor’s offices to support patients at risk of not starting a treatment or discontinuing early

Janssen teams: Patient Engagement & Customer Solutions, Analytics, Content, & Development

Post Beta launch

UX research & UX design / String & Key

Disrupting the insurance space

A year and a half-long journey to build and launch Wyshbox – a B2C life insurance product. We discovered a new way to look at how one protects their life. One that gets you what you need – no more, no less.
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Project highlights:
→ Owned the experience, UX wires and UX copy of 6 product features
→ Identified an opportunity for user testing that would help define a problem area in our data analytics 
→ Threw myself into my own bootcamp to learn Webflow and co-built a public site from scratch

* Full case study available upon request

background

Redefining life insurance coverage

We found that people are likely to cover 40% more than they need, resulting in over paying for their coverage. In the current life insurance landscape, the question of how one determines their coverage amount is abstract: "How much do you want to cover?" Instead, we broke life insurance down to the make up of one's life responsibilities (debts, dependents, loose ends, and legacies) in order to determine their overall coverage amount.

ux design

Designing a profile of one’s life wishes

As a team of three UX designers, we designed a user-friendly, business-aligned, and legally-sound product made up of 20 features for both native mobile and responsive web.

UI design by Soong Shin and Luis Pedraza

ux design

Beneficiary: a feature of true complexity

The Beneficiary feature was one of six product features where I owned the experience, wireframing, and UX copy. It was a true test of organizing information and meticulous collaboration to accommodate changing business needs, tech capabilities, insurance requirements, and legalities.

Final Beneficiary designs (UI design by Soong Shin and Luis Pedraza)

Post-launch user testing

How might we simplify the Wish Builder experience in order to encourage more users to complete it?

Once launching, our data analytics showed that 32.7% of users were dropping off in our onboarding wish-building flow. We ran two concepts through testing to discover the root of the issue. I strategized and led 26 comparative user testing sessions that guided our iteration of the designs.

Research objectives:
- Learn what testers expect of the product when navigating the home page
- Test the concept of a wish builder. Does it add value?
- Test the performance the Wish Builder experience

Methods:
- Moderated comparative user testing

research learnings

Because we break coverage out into wishes, we need to give our users more detail

Wish builder concept learnings:
- Covering life needs were a priority (above cost)
- It helped testers think of things they wouldn’t have already considered
- Some became more confident in their understanding of life insurance after the builder experience

Builder experience learnings:
- There was some uncertainty about adding what they felt they need
- Testers liked being guided when determining amounts but there needs to be more clarity
- It’s an experience that takes time

impact

Using analytics to gauge our success

We broke our research learnings into two phases of work. Phase 1 included moving the wish builder earlier in our onboarding flow, editing the navigation, removing unnecessary wish adding steps, and replacing screens with modals. This work resulted in an increase to 72.2% completion in our wish builder flow. Phase 2 work included researching to define accurate suggested wish dollar amounts and our recommended amount calculations.

digital experience design, financial technology, qualitative research, usability testing

February 2020 - April 2022

UX Designer (iOS & responsive web), UX Researcher, & Webflow Designer

18 - 45 year olds – a focus on cohorts who are in the midst of big life events or have an accumulation of debt

Design (UX, UI, copy), Strategy, Marketing, Legal, Underwriting, & Development teams

Post launch

• Public site built in Webflow
• App store download

Service design / The Social Impact Studio

Mapping studio to client relationships

The Social Impact Studio is people-first studio that co-creates with mission-driven organizations to expand their impact through strategy, program, and service design. I led an effort to streamline the engagement with our clients and ensure that the experience was valuable for both client and studio. From intro conversations to our final “goodbyes,” I mapped the goals, touch points, challenges, and ways of injecting fun throughout our interactions. The journey map helped us identify ways to replicate our materials seamlessly and opportunities to rethink how we can best engage with each other.

service design, journey mapping

2018

Service Designer & Impact Strategist

Jessica Mason

Taylor Holloway

UX design / Charles Schwab

Fostering financial independence through play

The best teacher in life is life itself. In an effort to bolster financial education amongst teenagers and young adults, we simulated real life decision making through gamification as a way to teach savings, budgeting, borrowing, and investing. We built an experience that 1) Enforces learning by doing, 2) Makes financial knowledge approachable, and 3) Peaks interest and engagement.

Project highlights:
→ Spent hours in Miro organizing and building chaotic trees of lesson plans
→ Played sound designer and chose all the sounds within the game to enhance the experience

* Full case study available upon request

Lesson plan tree in Miro

Final designs (UI design by Soong Shin and Hannah Groom Decker)

digital experience design, financial literacy, game design, curriculum design

2018 - 2019

UX Designer & Curriculum Designer

Ethnographic research & service design / Pratt Center for Community Development

Chipping away at poverty through community design

This was a year-long study and collaboration with the Park Slope Community Help, Inc. (CHiPS), an organization providing meals to the community. Through the act of composting, we aimed to deepen connections between CHiPS, the Park Slope Food Co-op, a local community garden, and the surrounding community. My engagement with CHiPS in the Gowanus/Park Slope neighborhood revealed a gap often seen between social and environmental spaces. I wanted to challenge a common assumption that the poor are unproductive members of society that drain community resources. In this project, the opportunity to fuse this gap appeared through addressing food waste. The result of our year together was a self-sustaining program that encourages the reduction of food waste through connecting CHiPS with NYC's composting program and their surrounding community gardens. The program was implemented through staff and volunteer training with the assistance of visual graphics designed to live in CHiPS' kitchen.

* Full case study available upon request

service design, civic engagement, ethnographic study, volunteering, grant writing

2016 - 2017

Lead Researcher & Designer

Jennifer E. Telesca, PhD / Assistant Professor of Environmental Justice / Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute

Pratt Center for Community Development

Park Slope Community Help, Inc. (CHiPS)

Park Slope Food Co-op

Greenspace on 4th

Old Stonehouse

Participatory research & service design / Lehigh University Mountaintop

Giving those aging & living in the city a seat at the table

The world population of 65+ are projected to double by 2050 and with an increasingly aging world, improving aging lives becomes a necessity. As a multi-disciplinary team, we combined our expertise to learn more about the 65+ living in the Lehigh Valley, PA. We used WHO's Age-Friendly Cities structure as inspiration and focused our time learning and collaborating with aging individuals from two facilities. As a larger group, we came up with solutions to improve quality of live and self-sufficiency within the Lehigh Valley.

My main role as the designer was to guide my team through a human-centered and participatory design process and encourage us to work visually. Together, we learned how to collect proper data, interview as a way of conversing, and design as a collective. This collaboration was as much an exploration of design as it was an experiment on what happens when you get a med student, a social scientist, engineers, and a designer in the same room.

* Full case study available upon request

participatory research, service design

June - October 2016

Lead Designer, Facilitator, & Researcher

Ryan McGuire / Mechanical Engineering / Lehigh University

Joshua Hitchings / MD Candidate / Temple University School of Medicine

Teresita Liebel / Integrated Engineering, Arts, & Sciences / Lehigh University

Sara Keeler / Psychology / Lehigh University

UX, UI design / Independent project

Teaching empathy through technology

My research for this project began with long, curious walks around Brooklyn and observations of artifacts of people within space. Observations led to frustrations – our ignorance towards the natural environment, a lack of care, and younger generations losing empathy in a rapidly-growing digital age. Let's Grow became a way to challenge my belief that technology is a barrier to the physical world and pushed me to explore ways in which the digital and physical spheres can embrace each other.

Let's Grow is an experience designed to encourage environmental stewardship by teaching children to care for their plant. A sensor-based LED works together with an app to communicate the plant’s need for water, sunlight, and nutrients. Over time, app notifications become vague as the child moves through different narrative stages, allowing them to learn lessons in patience and responsibility. Gradually, they become independent of the app itself.

digital experience design, interactive play, disruptive design

2016

Design research & product design / Independent project

Redesigning the epipen

After a deep dive into the EpiPen universe (case studies, articles, 1:1 conversations) I found that many people expressed an intimidation with this life-saving device. This led to an exploration of the form and mechanical function of the EpiPen to design something that feels safer in an emergency situation.

user testing, desk research, prototyping, product design

2016