Past Experiences

Throughout my career so far, I've contributed to the companies that I've worked at in a profound way. I've always been focused on one thing: providing timely, simple, efficient, and intuitive solutions to whatever problem I am asked to solve.

I've compiled a list and descriptions of some of my past work that I have done for both the Royal Bank of Canada and Loblaw while I was a co-op student. Even though my time at each company was short, I believe I was able to achieve my goals and provide the business with tremendous value.

Please note that the following art and graphics are a re-representation of the solutions I have built. This is due to the fact that the apps I had built for RBC and Loblaw happen to be internal apps and may contain sensitive data, and they are also subject to confidentiality rules, so I was unable to acquire screenshots of the actual apps that I had built.

Instead, I made some mock-up art filled with sample data which I believe captures the essence of the design language and the vision I had in mind when I built the various solutions. Hope you enjoy.

"Whenever I build or design a product I think to myself 'if I was the end user, would I enjoy using it?' If the answer is 'no', I go back to the drawing board." - Andy Zhou

RBC InSight Portal

The RBC Insight Portal was envisioned as a way for team managers to, at a quick glance, keep track of the various projects that are going on and each colleague's allocation of their time (as a percentage) on each project. For example, in this sample screenshot, the manager can quickly see that Stacey is over allocated (her time has been allocated a total of 120%) and spread very thinly across many different projects. Over allocation is a huge problem as it leads to employee dissatisfaction and general workplace stress. The manager can see that Raj and Vance have some availability, so with this information provided by InSight, she may decide to to take Stacey off some projects and put Raj and Vance on.

The InSight Web App would also provide specific information on the progress of each project and represent information such as whether or not the project has run over-budget. Additional features such as a timeline of each specific project is to be added as a feature in an upcoming update. The team manager would also have the opportunity to file an automatically generated report either to keep for their own purposes or send to the VP of their department in case a report is requested.

RBC Direct Marketing Portal

The RBC Direct Marketing Portal was designed to allow the marketing team to update Toll Free Telephone numbers that are associated with various promotions and marketing campaigns.

While on the surface it seems mundane, the Toll Free telephone numbers for promotions and marketing campaigns change all the time, and is crucial for the automatic call routing system to know which Toll Free number belongs to which service, promotion or marketing campaign in order for it to properly route a customer's call to the right agent.

For example, a customer calling in to cancel a lost credit card may be in a hurry and it would be extremely frustrating if the call was accidentally directed to a promotional campaign for a new mortgage, or just to an agent that was unqualified or unauthorized to help out with the situation.

Prior to the Direct Marketing Portal, whenever a change has to be made to a Toll Free number associated with a campaign, it would have to be done manually by sending an email request with the requestor's contact information to the appropriate manager.

This process was extremely slow and inefficient, and turnaround times may take up to 3 weeks (by which time the campaign may already be over).

I was tasked with helping develop a portal that solved this issue. The solution requires a simple form that the marketing personnel would fill out which would grab their contact information and employee number. As well, it would include information about which campaign they are trying to change and what the new campaign information is. This form can be filled out in less than 5 minutes provided that the employee has all the required information on hand.

Once the form is submitted, the appropriate manager would login and see a summary of the results of the form, and simply has to choose between "approve" or "deny".

If approved, the information on the form will be used to update the system immediately.

Thus, with the Direct Marketing App, a formerly 3 week long process can be reduced down to just 5-10 minutes.

Loblaw Management Microstrategy Dashboard

Microstrategy is a data visualization tool used by Loblaw to provide data analysts and managers with useful data on whatever information they request. For example, the supply chain team may want to know how many boxes of cookies were sold in Ontario across all Loblaw stores last week. Even something highly specific can be pulled by an SQL query in the background and plotted as a chart in Microstrategy in what's called a "dashboard". Over time, the amount of dashboards became somewhat overwhelming and management lacked insight into which dashboards are being used and which ones can be deleted to free up more space and processing power.

I was tasked with creating a dashboard to properly represent that information as well as provide other useful metrics like average time spent on specific dashboards.

Sometimes I Draw