Working for Kareo

If you follow my checkins or Instagrams you may have noticed I’ve been spending a lot of time in California recently.

In June I started contracting for Kareo and as of 1st October I’ve taken a position as their Interaction Designer in Irvine, CA.

Kareo, who are they?

Kareo develop healthcare software. Specifically they help small practices and doctors get paid with their medical billing software. Think of it as an invoice system for doctors, but 100 times more complicated than any other invoice system.

For the past few years they’ve been increasing their market share with a desktop application. Now, with their recent investment, Kareo look to take things to a new level focusing on user experience and developing new web, desktop and mobile products that help their customers.

Interaction Designer

As Interaction Designer I form part of the Product Team, working closely with the Director of Product and Engineering team.

The type of stuff I get to do on a daily basis includes:

• Customer visits and research
• Product ideas and discovery
• User flows and wireframes
• Designing prototypes
• User testing
• UI design for web and mobile
• Markup (HTML/CSS)

Goodbye freelancing

As much as I love the freedom of freelancing, I felt it was time to take that next step.

There are a number of benefits working full time with a product company, that you miss out on as a freelancer, or even doing client work:

• Spend more time getting to know the customer
• Extensive prototyping and user testing
• Measure project results, and continue to iterate based on ongoing feedback
• See a product evolve through the product development life cycle
• Work with a team of talented people with different skills and learn from that team
• Be part of and responsible for the success (or failure) of a product
• Focus on the quality of work I'm producing without having to worry about billable hours

Of course there are disadvantages, and I will miss choosing what projects to work on, less meetings, being my own boss and sleeping in, but I’m really looking forward to contributing to the success of Kareo.

Some recent Kareo work

Kareo has done a great job to get to where they are today, but coming from a UX designer’s point of view there’s definitely room for improvement.

Anything I’ve been working on so far isn’t public facing yet, but you can keep an eye on some of the stuff I’m working on via Dribbble.

It’s a new challenge that I’m really looking forward to.