"Paula and I worked together at Sun Life. For the majority of our time working together I was the Product Owner for an agile squad and she was the UX designer on the team. As an experienced Product Owner, I’ve worked with many UX partners over the years and I was thrilled to quickly find out that Paula is the type of UX designer that really listens to understand, collaborates and knows how to provide value to her clients! Paula has a great understanding of UX tools, best-practices and rules, but also takes the time to have an equal understanding of her end-users and is truly able to build the best experience for the users!

 

One of my favourite things about working with Paula was talking through difficult experience situations or roadblocks - together we would recognize the problem, discuss ideas and challenges, come up with options and hash out the pros and cons! Our discussions were exciting because Paula always came with ideas and you could feel her passion, she would never get defensive and always had user-centric reasoning for her recommendations. Paula is very reasonable and has flexibility too, though, which, from my experience is hard to come by - she understood when we had limiting factors along the way - maybe we were limited by time, or technology, or some other limiting issue.

 

Whenever possible Paula would provide a best-case scenario recommendation and an alternate solution to accommodate our limitations. In those instances, Paula was very thorough in her communication and documentation so that we could ensure that if our limitations were removed we still knew how to modify the experience to make it even better! From a skillset perspective Paula had all the knowledge and expertise required to be a great partner - but she was also always reliable, a strong team contributor and overall just a great person to work with! Any team lucky enough to have Paula join them would be in very good hands!"