BRYCE LEE

EXPERIENCE STRATEGY & DESIGN

I'm a hands-on process leader, and a multi-disciplined visual and experience designer.

Ascensia Diabetes Care

Since 2018, I have been leading and building out the Human Factors & Experience Design Practice at Ascensia Diabetes Care.

We are a very small team, including myself, a UX designer, UX Design Researcher, and a Content Strategist.
We support a full R&D Innovation lab comprised of Systems, Mechanical, Electrical, and Chemical Engineers, partnering with Medical, Regulatory, Data Privacy and Clinical trial teams, to bring products to the Diabetes community.

A Higher Calling. A Higher Standard
Every role, project, and team in my past has been rewarding, but the work I have been able to do in this environment has been the most personally satisfying to date. Working to improve the lives and health of people with significant medical challenges is a great incentive to go to work, for sure, but the science side of my Art + Science mindset has been transformed by the standard of excellence required by medically approved product design in a highly regulated environment.

One of the primary standards we adhere to on the design side is IEC/ISO 62366, Guidance on the Application of Usability Engineering to Medical Devices. It is a globally harmonized standard accepted by the FDA, The EU's CE health and safety organization, and other regions with different regulatory agencies. Practitioners of UX and Product design will recognize many of the familiar techniques of usability testing we use to make products easy to use. In the case of medical devices whose improper use may lead to harm, usability is no longer optional. We must comprehensively discover all conceivable risks to the patient, and design thoroughly tested solutions that demonstrably minimize those risks to acceptable levels. This involves the usual prototype usability tests, and extends to formalized Formative and Summative testing, conducted by external impartial subject matter experts, whose results must be submitted to the regulatory agencies before they are allowed to go to market.

All the usual constraints remain the same: Not quite enough people, time or budget, dispersed pools of information and expertise that must be integrated, with the experts that created them needing to be recruited into the deeply collaborative process that turns information into insight, and ideas of the possible into solutions that real-world people can use effectively and enjoyably.

Sneak preview.
Team Type 2 was a pitch for an innovation contest sponsored by Ascensia Diabetes care. I didn't win, but they hired me to lead and build out their experience practice. The TT2 concept is a data connected, behavioral optimization app, conceived of, designed and prototyped single handedly. No other designers were harmed in the making of this concept.

What if you were invited to lead User Experience Strategy & Design for a ground-up redesign of a flagship website, continue your corporate intranet Design Thinking on an even more expansive platform, work with some of the most innovative web design shops on the planet, and instill UX & UCD principles into the culture and HR Transformation of a Fortune 100 company? If you are like me, you probably said yes to that opportunity.

AIG

Designing through change, as AIG stumbled and then rebuilt itself, was a great experience in retrospect, but at the time, it had many moments of high stress, to say the least. I was working globally as Associate Director - Creative Services Manager for the in-house agency of this then Fortune 10, now Fortune 55 company, doing digital damage control, conducting business as usual, transforming HR, and designing Contact, a NN/g award winning intranet

Doing app design for Glucofacts for Bayer Diabetes Care, a desktop app that paired with Bayer's Contour family of Blood Glucose meters, was a consulting gig that let me use all my hands-on skills, from logos to information display design, while developing the user-journeys and interactions necessary for this desktop application to pass FDA regulatory assessment and win a Silver from the MDEA

Based on the interactive design & development I had done up till then, FCBi — a joint venture between Direct and Interactive — brought me on as an Associate Creative Director to lead an early departure for the agency into transactional experience marketing for MetLife, successfully going up against Sapient for ownership of the experience design part of the account. The creative freedom they gave me (and my talented team) resulted in MetLife's award winning and long lived MyBenefits/MetLink portals. I also provided creative direction and hands on design for the United States Postal Service and AT&T Business accounts, as well as numerous pitches for AT&T Wireless, JiffyLube and more.

BRYCE LEE

EXPERIENCE STRATEGY & DESIGN

Ascensia Diabetes Care

New York Life Insurance

AIG

Bayer Diabetes Care

FCBi