Angela Schmeidel Randall is Founder & CEO of Normal Modes LLC. She is also a Co-Founder and Principal of Schmeidel Randall, LLC, a consulting practice that provides biotech entrepreneurship guidance to small companies. She has the best careers in 2009, according to U.S. News & World Report.

In 1997, by great providence, she fell into a job doing web development work at a growing financial services company. The experience remains one of the best things that's ever happened to her. She loves the web. She's passionate about great end-to-end customer experiences — ones that aren't limited to the web, but integrate the web into the real world.

Later she continued honing her craft by working for a university, a major airline, and a futures trading firm. Her most rewarding career experience was working on the year-long, end-to-end redesign of Continental Airlines' website in 2006 & 2007. A member of the user experience team, she focused on creating user-centered designs for My Account, OnePass Rewards system, and the hotel and car booking engines. She feel in love with eye tracking and usability testing during the same time.

Having spent much of her adult life finishing her bachelor's, then her master's degree, she believes in life long learning in the liberal arts. In her spare time, she cooks (ask her about soup!), dabbles in photography, and explores the world.

Angela's Portfolio

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Wireframes

Normal Modes (2009)

I launched the Normal Modes website in August 2009 at the end of a 6 week development cycle that included sitemapping, wireframes, original content development, and shopping cart workflow integration. (I brought in additional resources to help with visual design and programming.) The project allowed me to wireframe an entire website using my favorite wireframe development tool - Balsamiq.

 

User Interface Designs

Continental Airlines - My Account (2006-2007)

In late 2006, I was tasked with creating a new "My Account" homepage that incorporated the new design look and feel without alienating a large base of extremely loyal power users (frequent flyers). When asked in previous usability studies, these users made it clear the existing homepage precisely met their needs and emphatically did not want to see anything change. Before launch, I also designed a usability study that leveraged user interviews and magnitude estimation to determine if the new design would be successful.

Some comments from FlyerTalk.com, an online loyalty program BB*, at the final design's launch:

"WOW!!! Check out the Elite-O-Meter in the upper left!" - from Bonehead
"I like it! Nice change CO." - from danceswithsunlight,
"Very spiffy new site indeed." - from Anglo Large Clawed Otter
"Wow! Very nice and easier to read. and I love the Elite-O-Meter!...it's a very nice change, nonetheless." - from susanaustin

 

Continental Airlines - Reward Charts (2007)

An ongoing pet project from 2005 until it was completed in late 2007, I leveraged AJAX along with general usability principles to produce reward charts that allow users quickly and easily research miles need for reward travel. This project was Continental's first foray into AJAX driven applications for challenging data problems. I also conducted quantitative usability testing with magnitude estimation and qualitative research with paper prototypes prior to launch.

 

Continental Airlines - Car Booking Engine (2007)

I redesigned the rental car booking engine of continental.com so it reflected our site redesign and provided additional upgrade opportunities. These upgrades, along with a significant conversion rate increase, produced a monthly incremental revenue increase of more than 50%.

 

Workflow/Process Flow Analysis

Continental Airlines End-to-End Voice Automated Employee Flight Booking Engine (2007-2008)

A fun challenge, for my first foray into voice automation, I designed a voice-powered flight booking engine for employees featuring open seats by flight, roundtrip travel to/from both domestic and international locations, and seat booking based on user profiles. This system also authenticates a broad user-base including non-Continental employees, returning a smaller approved dataset in the same call flow. This product is the only end-to-end voice automated booking engine we were aware of in the industry.