Joan Kristensen

Leading Experience Design for PGIM, the investment management business of Prudential Financial – 10th largest asset manager globally. (multi-affiliate/$1.5 trillion AUM). Responsible for UX strategy, innovation and governance across 7 affiliate marketing sites built from bespoke, re-usable components (Drupal/AEM). Working strategically in both leadership and as a hands-on designer with direct reports, product managers, tech resources, affiliate marketing teams and leadership to build and prioritize initiatives that deliver the greatest value across PGIM affiliates. PGIM UX team's work spans journey-mapping, research and user testing through design and UAT.  

Strategic Achievements

• Building strong relationships across affiliate stakeholder marketing teams and partnering with them to build out experiences that advance key marketing objectives. Examples: providing more valuable fund data to customer prospects on first-load of fund pages, or featuring searchable short-form blog content within their marketing sites, but in a unique and more blog-like format (PGIM Fixed Income’s Blog then won a Gramercy Institute Financial Content Marketing Award in 2022).
• Building PGIM’s first authenticated client portal experience. Discovery has included in-person user research with advisors to refine requirements for portal, as well as participation with agencies in design thinking workshops across PGIM affiliates, and evaluating vendor POC’s.
• Currently expanding PGIM UX team with Salesforce-specific UX resources. Interviewed and advised on many hires across the Prudential Customer Experience Design organization – both at junior and peer level. 
• Designed new career pathing and leveling documentation for Customer Experience Design organization, including updated job descriptions across 5 levels and 2 career trajectories (individual contributor and people manager). Currently under review by Prudential HR for adoption.

Tech and Operational Achievements

• Instituted a base-level PGIM design system where there was none. Atomic-level componentry, grids, brand basics can now be referenced by all stakeholders via a ZeroHeight link. 
• Introduced development teams to the process of reading UX specs from development links and understanding grids and tools we reference for UX UAT markup and documentation.
• Currently building a Storybook-based design system (platform-agnostic code) for PGIM. Code-level design system will replace ZeroHeight version, simplifying governance, enabling consistency, more rapid development cycles, and allowing for better collaboration between UX and tech teams.

Design and Experience Achievements

39 New Marketing Site Components Designed/Launched by 2-person UX team across 2 years, including complex table row-to-flex box component, collapsible heroes, pill filtering and other marketing components with increasing flexibility and power.

New Capabilities:

• • Microsites
  • Blogs
  • Fund Pages
  • Strategy Pages

Redesigned Experiences:

• • Attestation
  • Video Play/Library
  • Subscribe to Content
  • Site Translations – to Non-Latin Character Sets (Simplified Chinese)

2023 Work in Progress:

• • Authenticated User Portal (insights and transactions) - Salesforce Experience Cloud
  • PGIM Brand Refresh via code-based design system components
  • Career path restructuring for CXD org via re-imagined career ladders, promotion process

Worked strategically in design and leadership roles for "big bet" UX projects across global service and marketing sides of MetLife's business. Senior member of founding team for UX Center of Excellence at MetLife, providing leadership and guidance on delivering best-in-class customer experiences for markets worldwide. 

Key Achievements

• Designed/documented optimal user experiences for enterprise-level sites and mobile apps.
• Collaborated on MetLife's first and second Global UX Design Systems, providing design standards and UX templates that enable product teams to create consistent service and marketing experiences and drive down design costs.
• Served as Agile Product Owner for development team focused on strategic UX innovation.
• Facilitated design thinking workshops as a participant and group leader.
• Supervised & collaborated with UX vendors on high-stakes experience design initiatives in markets across EMEA and Asia.
• Key player in successful launch of MetLife's latest brand-evolution U.S. marketing (flagship) site, to be replicated across 45 MetLife markets worldwide. Redesign results: 
  • Page views per visit - up 12%
  • Bounce rate: down 23%
  • Time per visit: up 6%
  • Form completions: up 16%
• Leadership role in design and launch of MetLife's market-winning mobile sales app, enabling digital underwriting for Middle East and Latin America. 
  • Won back a 10-year exclusive distribution partnership with a bank we had previously lost to another carrier (due to poor experience of previous sales app). 
  • Won another 5-year exclusive distribution partnership with a bank that had planned to sell multiple carriers.

Deliverables included interface design, high-fidelity wireframes and prototypes, design thinking workshop enablement, reusable component patterns, design systems, user journeys and deep heuristic analysis.

Worked on challenging UIs for complex, web-based applications. Heavy focus on re-branding of two products for the wider market through improved UI and visual presence.

Key Achievements

• Collaboration with instructional designers and product managers to achieve best solutions.
• Advocacy for user-centered design, out-of-the-box thinking and the importance of detail in making a great product.
• Prototyping. Delivering pixel-perfect mock-ups/visual specs for developers.
• Creation of visual assets (in Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.)
• QA reviews and visual direction of development (or pivot design based on dev limitations).

Skills 

• Self-managed, deadline-oriented problem solver who enjoys working on a variety of challenges simultaneously.
• Enjoy participating as an active member of the software development team, working with business, product, development, and QA.
• Current on latest conventions in the interface design and user experience communities.
• Adobe Creative Suite expert.
• Solid writer and visual communicator. Deep experience with marketing strategy, branding and art direction.
• Able to design for business drivers and key objectives, as well as usability.

UI/UX and email marketing design. Projects included mobile app designs for Vetstreet/Antech, Ethicon and Sanofi.

Partnered with a copywriter to establish new creative department for LexisNexis Law Firm Marketing Solutions. Worked strategically with Acquisition and Retention Marketing Directors and Brand Managers to launch 20 campaigns within first 7 months, resulting in increased POS. Tactics include email, landing pages, direct mail, social media and microsites to target prospects and support existing customers. Redesigned campaigns for improved performance per A/B and Test-and-Roll results for open rates and click-throughs.

Key Achievements

• Elevated design, messaging and brand awareness over all prior years
• Creative services cost-savings of $300,000 over 2011, with greater POS (vs. use of multiple vendors)
• Design/UI/UX for Customer retention microsite - first of kind - to inform and engage existing customers
• Art direction for 4 major videos
• Assumed design/production lead for retention email initiatives to save department $25,000 in development fees
• “Above *& Beyond” award for breakthrough creative and improved open rates/POS

• Associate Digital Creative Director: FranklynHealthcom, Parsippany NJ
• Partner, Creative Director: Siren Communications Inc., NYC, NJ 

Major: Art/Writing

Human-Computer Interaction

Conducting Usability Testing

Classes in HTML and Flash