For the past 8+ years, I have worked at the intersection of customer experience research, product design, and business strategy— predominately working to design transportation systems and places that encourage more sustainable behaviors.
Seeking to understand the needs of all stakeholders and customers, I help organizations navigate towards systemic and sustainable (environmental and financial) growth.
links to selected work
Designing a B2B SaaS solution to manage streets safely & sustainablyRe-designing civic services to be more equitable AND sustainable
Nudging sustainable consumer decisions with behavioral design
Reducing commuter emissions through data-driven decision-making
Measuring the impact of street transformation pop-ups
Publishing best practices on designing streets for kids
Re-designing streets to save pedestrian lives
Launching the first-ever lifespan methodology for e-scooters (link to report)
core skills
Sustainable service design
Visual design (Adobe CC & Figma UI)
Urban design for all ages & abilities
Agile management
Market strategy
Making the case for safety
UX research
Measuring & evaluating impact
Iterative prototyping
let’s connect
@katgowland on all socials
e: katgowland1@gmail.com
A multi-disciplinary humanity-centered-designer at the intersection of research and strategy— passionate about cities, behavior change, and addressing the climate crisis.
quicklinks to selected work
Co-designing a safe & sustainable way to manage trafficA roadmap for a equitable resident-government relationship
How to measure the impact of street transformation pop-up projects
Best practices on designing streets for kids
What must be considered in an e-scooter lifespan methodology?
Painting streets to save pedestrian lives
key skills & interests
Measuring & evaluating impact
Making the case for safety
Iterative prototyping
Participatory research & testing
Agile management
Visual communication design
Sustainable service design
Urban design for all ages & abilities
Market strategy
let’s connect
@katgowland on all socials
e: katgowland1@gmail.com
Meet Kat —
In my work to date, from Copenhagen to Philadelphia, Montréal, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, I have grown a web of experiences improving the user experience of products and services that support safe and sustainable movement through cities.
From leading a project team to win a Fast Company Innovation by Design honorable mention for reimagining the City of Chicago’s ticketing system to painting streets at 2 a.m. in Mumbai to implement a road safety project, I have proven a consistent bias for action towards developing and meeting safety & sustainability targets.
My professional experiences span the following roles:
Designing a B2B SaaS solution to manage streets safely & sustainably
Product Management Intern, Xtelligent, 2022
Context
This work was completed through an internship with Xtelligent, a lean DOE-funded venture whose ITS software is helping cities better manage and control traffic signal networks in order to progress carbon emission reduction and road safety goals.
Contributions
I championed product management and UX research for Xtelligent— developing a tool for traffic engineers to manage streets in a more proactively safe and sustainable way.
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I had an agile design strategy process, and used the following visual as a guide on Miro to understand the different areas of the design process that I worked within. It is an adaptation of the double diamond that was more customized to the way our early stage B2B SaaS startup operated.
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Capabilities
Agile management | Visual design (Adobe CC & Figma UI) | UX design | Market strategy
I took on responsibilities spanning UX research through interviews and A/B testing with traffic engineers (Image A-B), UI design (Image C) & backlog prioritization (Image D), and go-to-market strategy. This included conducting ongoing user experience research & testing and launching a new system for customer insights to inform backlog prioritization.
Image A, B
Image C
Image D
Outcomes
The product management system I created during this internship (See image D above) leveled up the lean engineering & leadership team’s ability to continue using research to drive critical decisions across all aspects of product development and backlog prioritization.
Redesigning civic services to be more equitable AND sustainable
Designer & Strategist, with IIT Institute of Design (ID), 2023, for the City of Chicago
Context
The systems that have been designed to support city government operations today are complex and often frustrating for city servants and residents alike. The cost of road infrastructure maintenance alone is stifling, municipal financial budgets depend on fines & fees to make ends meet, and the infrastructure in place on streets, like red light cameras, speed cameras, and parking meters, often do not serve the best interest of city voters.
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In this 3-month Sustainable Solutions workshop, my team worked with the City of Chicago’s Department of Finance to address the question:
How might we redesign the fines and fees system in the City of Chicago to be more equitable AND sustainable?
Contributions
In 1 week sprints with groups of 3, my peers and I learned, through rapid prototyping with arduino, how a suite of new infrastructures could enable more sustainable and equitable modes of operation, governance, and revenue generationat the system level.
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Those iterative prototyping sprints inspired us to envision how potential new products and services could have an equitable and sustainable impact on communities in Chicago. When I asked myself the question, “How might we reorient the goals of the fines & fees system to incentivize a shift away from cars and towards more active transit?” I identified an app that incentivizes sustainable transit decision-making with credits towards local civic investments as a highly impactful and equitable solution space and mocked it up as a concept of a product that could be included in our system re-design.
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At the midterm (Collage A) and completion of this course (Collage B), my classmates and I held a public conversation, for City staff and community members to engage in dialogue about how aspects of these multi-scale solutions might be able to be seen to fruition in the City, and what challenges would arise.
Collage A
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Collage B
Capabilities
Iterative prototyping | Adaptive leadership | Communciation design
Outcomes
The prototypes and deliverables we produced to explain the redesigned system were very successful at fueling conversations with city officials and Chicagoans about “what could be.” These types of conversations fuel the energy we need to see equitable sustainable progress realized.
Samples of content from the final deliverable, explaining the redesigned system:
Nudging sustainable consumer deecisions with behavioral design
Designer & Strategist, with IIT Institute of Design (ID), 2022, for Mars Wrigley
Context
At IIT Institute of Design, I took a Behavioral Design workshop course, in partnership with the Mars Wrigley BioDesign Challenge. I worked with a team of four on a design sprint to explore the following research question:
How might the moment of deciding whether to purchase a product be redesigned to encourage more sustainable consumerism?
Contributions
As a team of four, we engaged in rapid, iterative prototyping to test customer responses to different design interventions at the point of purchasing product at a gocery store in Chicago, as an international resident. After defining the scope of work and research criteria, we conducted a screener survey to filter participants based on demographic diversity and shopping habits. We then held 1:1 interviews to better understand those users habits and needs, before rounds of usability tests with our focal group on a suite of 16 protoypes that simulated a redesigned purchasing experience.
One example of a protoype we designed and tested was an AR app that would enable customers in grocery stores to scan unfamiliar produce and get a variety of information about ripeness, seasonality, common flavor pairings, and recipes from different global regions (Image A). This prototype ended up being quite motivating to research participants to try Brussels sprouts for the first time.
Image A
Capabilities
Sustainable service design | UX research | Iterative prototyping | Measuring & evaluating impact
Outcomes
Upon completion of the research sprint we had an engaging panel discussion with a range of Behavioral Design specialists who were intrigued by the matrix that we designed to synthesize insights and compare prototypes (Image B) and said they would use it as inspiration to inform future studies.
Image B
This matrix was used to summarize the results of our rounds of usability tests. We used a heat map to highlight which prototypes in the matrix performed in a way that was more motivating to research participants. Prototype H, the try-before-you-buy method, most successfully encouraged research participants (international students) to decide on the spot to buy a new type of (sustainable, in season, local) produce.