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 use my development background to supplement the development resources available to the UX Team to build out controls, widgets, and functionality within our UI library.

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The role of the developers on the UX Team is to work closely with designers to create the widgets, controls, etc that support a key foundation of the products that we design for, with the primary product being Ansys Discovery. All of this development work is done within a UI library that is consumed by products at Ansys (including Discovery). This opportunity allows the designs to be explored further outside of the context of a specific product, giving the ability to improve the layout, interaction design, and visual aesthetics without the focus on the functionality of our engineering simulation software. The developers on the UX Team also play a crucial role to work with the product developers to incorporate widgets, components, etc from UI library into appropriate product to support the desired workflows.

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My goal for the development work has been to supplement the capabilities of the developers on my team, making sure the changes and updates to controls can be made for the Discovery product that otherwise wouldn’t happen due to a shortage of development resources for our UI Framework. I have worked on a number of widgets and controls, and have had to develop a couple of controls from the ground up to support a design.

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The areas of the UI that I have developed within include:

• SID (Simulation Information Display)

• Variations Panel

• Variations Chart

• Variations Generator

• Progress Bars

• Message Box Dialogs

• Layers Panel

• Home Page

• Welcome Screen

• User Settings Window