SLIS Alumni News

SLIS alumnus Derren Hermann (MIS'00) and colleague Richard Douglass gave a presentation on September 15, 2009 at SLIS (Room 030). Hermann and Douglass are both User Experience Managers with Nationwide. The announcement stated:

• Presentation: How a SLIS alumni ended up at Nationwide working on and incredible User Experience team of 40+ individuals and how you could end up doing this too!

• We asked Derren Hermann to give more details about his career, and tips for SLIS students. He responded to this email interview:

I'm currently a manager on the User Experience team at Nationwide. Our overall team is around 40 people. We have a director and three managers. I manage a team of about 15 information architects and interaction designers. My team creates site maps, flow diagrams, and lots and lots of wireframes. The two other managers handle the visual design and usability analysis teams. The visual design team is responsible for all design specifications and creative, while the usability analysis team does a lot of discovery work (e.g. contextual inquiries, focus groups, participatory design sessions, interviews, etc.) and they run all of the user testing within our usability lab.

Our team has people from a wide variety of backgrounds. We have people with degrees in human-computer interaction, visual design, human factors, cognitive psychology, industrial design, and others. We have a mixture of full-time employees and contractors. We tend to be very collaborative and do quite a bit of knowledge sharing.

Nationwide is a rather large company that sells all varieties of insurance, investment products, various products for business owners, and we have an online bank. Our User Experience team is responsible for the online experience for all consumer facing websites and applications. This includes nationwide.com, our auto quote and bind application, all customer self-service areas, and iPhone apps to name a few. We design applications for sales agents and investment administrators. Furthermore, we maintain all online design standards for Nationwide.

So how did I end up as a user experience manager for a large Insurance company? I started out by gaining my undergraduate degree in cultural anthropology from Indiana University. I then went on to receive a MIS degree from SLIS in which I focused on human-computer interaction and information architecture. After graduating from SLIS, I spent about 3 years working as a usability specialist for Diamond Bullet Design up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was there that I learned a quite a bit from experience, including much about web accessibility and how to lead a project. I then came to Nationwide as a contractor and over time worked my way up to a manager.

My advice to students would be to focus on two things. One is to gain as much knowledge as possible about your discipline. The second is to work on being able to really lead an effort and communicate effectively. We look for people that can provide value similar to that of a senior level consultant. This doesn't mean you necessarily need to have a lot of experience, you just need to know what you're talking about when it comes to your discipline and be able to effectively work with all of your partners on any given project.

The best way to keep on the look out for jobs on the User Experience team at Nationwide is to send me your resume as you're coming close to graduation.

My email address is: hermand3@nationwide.com

Thanks,
Derren L. Hermann
Manager, User Experience
Customer Choice Distribution - Internet

Posted Sept. 17, 2009