Austin Macdowell

Designer

Hello! I'm a systems thinker & collaborator who simplifies complex user problems and solves them at their source, not just on the surface.I'm interested in content architecture and design systems and passionate about digital accessibility.

Projects

CMS architecture

Learn how I influenced the underlying structure of an internal tool to help users create and organize communications more easily.

Activity indicator

Learn how I helped assure chat users that a virtual agent was working on their task in the background.

Systematized emails

Learn how I created a scalable & consistent approach to the information sent in confirmation emails.

CMS architecture

Expedia Group / 2023

Myself and a design partner were asked to do a complete visual overhaul of an internal content management system that marketing folks used to send out content. We were on a tight timeline and the architecture of the system had already been determined by an engineering team. Product asked us to design it to help authors send out multiple instances of a “communication” across different channels at the same time. Plus, we were planning to externalize the platform and needed to align with broader industry mental models.As we started looking at the system and talking to internal users, I noticed a consistent pain point: the architecture of a “communication” confused authors and made it difficult to design a front-end without showing the complexity of the backend.My focus shifted from UI content to “concept mapping,” where I organized the existing objects in the system and tied them to their attributes to identify areas of improvement. From this, I proposed an additional layer of organization above “communication” that we called a “campaign,” which would allow folks to organize their messaging in a way that made sense to them and reduced complexity in the system.From this change, I helped…

  • Make it ~30% more efficient to create multiple instances of a single campaign, which compounds with each instance I create (7 attributes out of a total 24 shared by the two layers moved to encompass each campaign)

  • Align with users’ mental models & planning methods

  • Align and simplify previously incongruous terminology to reduce miscommunication

  • Create an architecture that would scale to meet the needs of product plans

  • Enable a number of delightful UI enhancements that wouldn’t have been possible if we’d had to represent the complexity of the old architecture

Activity indicator

Expedia Group / 2020

While building out an early version of Expedia Group’s proprietary chat platform, we encountered an issue with the loading state for new messages: when a “skill” (virtual agent task) took more than a few seconds, it appeared frozen. We knew this happened consistently for a couple of our more complex skills that required a number of checks on the backend.We were asked to come up with a design solution for it. The designers I worked with initially came up with a couple solutions that modernized the indicator from a visual standpoint, but still didn’t do much to infer that work was continuing to happen behind the scenes. I thought it’d be a good opportunity to use content to solve a problem.Where we had presented background updates as “system” messages from the user’s perspective, I proposed we use the updated visual treatment for loading messages to contain rotating content that could be customized for different scenarios. By sending these updates from the perspective of the virtual agent, we built empathy for it and trust in its ability to complete tasks.After validating with research, we also determined that it…

  • Increased user assurance (& therefore retention)

  • Was a marketable addition to partners using our component library

  • Scaled across brands and use cases, given its customizability

  • Enabled higher self-service, as folks remained dedicated to completing flows

  • Increased accessibility when used, as screen reader users received announcements of progress

Systematized emails

Expedia Group / 2024

While working in the “Communications” product area at Expedia Group, I joined a project whose goal was to improve & systematize confirmation emails. These are the ones you get when you’ve made a booking; we wanted to create a structure that would flex across all product verticals and allow space for dynamic information while preserving the position of core information throughout.The design team was a bit bloated and we were still forming partnerships across product and engineering. I quickly determined that I’d be most impactful by focusing on the core information hierarchy. It had been awhile since anyone had validated the order and importance of information we’d been sending folks. An additional ask from our product partners was to significantly shorten the length of emails while adding space for marketing content.I first conducted a round of internal testing where the working group all did an activity adjacent to affinity mapping to determine what we all found most important in emails of the sort. We then validated our findings with a round of external testing (with help from our research partners). While we didn’t get much clearer signal on the order of information, we gathered enough helpful comments to determine that our internal activity had landed close to general sentiment.From there, I created a systematized layout of product-agnostic blocks of information with guidance on dynamic content, plus I provided specific guidance for marketing guidance and tone of voice.My work contributed to a default template that…

  • clearly defined & ordered core information

  • shortened the base template by ~40%

  • scaled across lines of business

  • allowed for easy slotting of dynamic blocks of information

  • kicked off a larger systematization effort

  • put accessibility on the front foot for future designs