While my primary role has been to manage the User Experience Team within one of the business units at Ansys, with a particular focus on our contributions towards the design of the Discovery product, the allocation of resources made it impossible for me to focus just on management. An important part of my job has been to design various aspects of Discovery to cover the demand among the development teams for design work.

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In my years at Ansys, the design process that we conduct is tailored to the particular teams and projects we work on. The goal is to fit the design work as best into the larger software development process to ensure the greatest likelihood that our design work will be incorporated into the released software product, and not treated as a “nice idea” that could be used at a later time. For Discovery, this has translated to a focus on creating wireframes and mockups from low to medium to high fidelity in an iterative process from the early concept of the design to the final version, and performing usability studies as appropriate (We conducted a couple usability studies around the release of the Discovery product in July 2020, both with internal and external users, but I wasn't an active participant conducting the usability study or analyzing the results). The generative research that we use for the foundation of the design is handled by a different group at Ansys, so my job as designer begins after this has already occurred.

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My goal for my role as a UX designer (when considering my main responsibilities as a design manager) has been to supplement the capabilities of the designers on my team, to make sure that the design goals for the Discovery release cycle can be achieved despite the insufficient design resources we have. I have worked in a design capacity in many parts of the Discovery user interface, so I will focus on just a couple design projects:

• SID (Simulation Information Display): I will describe the project for creating the Simulation Information Display, which led to our team to design several additional features associated with the Simulation Information Display (SID).

• Home Page and Welcome Screen: I will describe the project to create a home page for the Discovery product, which also led to the need to design additional content, which led to the creation of the Welcome Screen.

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While the Discovery Project hasn't  the opportunity to participate in generative research, I have had the chance to conduct activities such as Contextual Inquiries and Interviews with other projects, where I used the activities to collect information and data about our users for the particular problem domain and create models to uncover the insights for us to use to drive the design process. Also, I have been an active participant in conducting and analyzing usability studies while working on other projects in my time at Ansys.