Kirsten Querna

UI/UX Engineer & Business Analyst

Hi, I'm Kirsten Querna.

I'm a detail oriented frontend engineer, business analyst & leader passionate about user experience. I love defining problems, analyzing solutions, and determining paths to success.

I am a Lead Business Analyst and Software Engineer 2 (UI/UX Specialist) at etailz, Inc. in Spokane, Washington.

Kirsten Querna

Current Location:

Spokane, Washington, USA

Connect:

Education


Gonzaga University

Spokane, Washington, USA

January 2017 - May 2019

Masters of Business Administration

Concentration in International and Entrepreneurial Business.

Carroll College

Helena, Montana, USA

August 2010 - May 2014

B.A. - Computer Science

Traditional Computer Science course study. Courses included web development, software engineering, descrete mathematics, database design, Cisco networking, small group communication, and cryptography.

University of Ulster - Magee

Londonderry (Derry), Northern Ireland, UK

September 2013 - December 2013

Study Abroad

C# Enterprise Computing, Web Database Development, and Interaction Design.

Experience


etailz, Inc.

Spokane, Washington, USA

August 2017 - Current

Lead Business Analyst / Software Engineer 2 – UI & UX Specialist

Create BA team (hire team, define expectations, manage tasks, review performance, provide feedback). Mentor BA intern. Establish / maintain processes with Product Management team. Establish documentation standards. Create wireframes & high-fidelity prototypes for new and existing proprietary software. Create BRD / TRD templates. Build / review / maintain TRDs for new projects and large enhancements. Define tasks from TRDs & customer reviews. Organize & execute development department activities. Support development team for UI & UX tasks. Manage project status and customer expectations. Research API functionality and capabilities.

etailz, Inc.

Spokane, Washington, USA

January 2017 - August 2017

Software Engineer 2 – UI & UX Specialist

Re-design flagship business application (requirement definition, user research, process definition & documentation, guide architectural discussions with dev team, design reviews, UI prototyping, expectation management with stakeholders, task definition). Create & maintain modularized & responsive front-end package for all internal applications (Composer, Laravel, SASS). Collaborate with creative & marketing teams to improve workflow with development team. Provide UX feedback on design projects. Communicate requirements / expectations across teams.

etailz, Inc.

Spokane, Washington, USA

July 2014 - December 2016

Software Engineer 1 – UI & UX Specialist

Create / update / maintain fully responsive public company sites from PSD files with SEO considerations (Magento, WordPress, Jekyll, Laravel). Interact with Amazon MWS APIs to collect, create, update, and delete data. Research, design & develop user interfaces for proprietary software. Analyze / document user & business requirements. Restructure information architecture. Create / update / manage HTML email templates for company sites and marketing blasts.

Projects


Strategic Management Case Study: etailz, Inc.

This paper took a look at the strategic decisions made by my current employer, etailz, Inc. Over the course of this paper etailz made many strategic changes, which made this paper more difficult to write but also enabled me to take a deeper look at the impact of decision making. This case study written for the final Strategic Management course at Gonzaga University and submitted on April 1st, 2019.

etailz, Inc. Case Study (pdf)

Tags: UI, UX, Design, project management, requirement definition

etailz, Inc. Case Study

Neptune - Application Re-Build

etailz' flagship proprietary application, built to manage everything from leads to products, was rebuilt from the ground-up in 2016 & 2017. I worked closley with the primary users, stakeholders, executives, and development team to establish the project scope, assumptions & requirements. I also built out all wireframes and prototypes, presented and updated assets according to customer feedback. I supported the development team and built out UI protoype branches, so our backend engineers could easily complete UI updates. Throughout the project I focused on improving user experience to enhance employee productivity. After the initial release, etailz saw a significant increase in productivity from the purchasing and lead generation teams (primary users).

Tags: UI, UX, Design, project management, requirement definition

Sparkle Frontend Framework

Sparkle

Sparkle is etailz's frontend framework and toolkit. The goal of Sparkle is to ensure consistancy and improve experiences for all etailz employees. Sparkle provides the development team with a compiled package of standardized UI elements and UX guidelines, thus providing our customers (internal employees) with a consistant UI/UX across all proprietary applications. Sparkle encompasses all the possible UI elements, example code, and necessary JS/CSS to comply with the etailz design standards. Sparkle is built on the Bootstrap 3 Framework, and is optimized for use with Laravel applications.

Tags: UI, UX, GIT, Design, responsive web development

Sparkle Frontend Framework

MasterTheMarketplace.com

The Master the Marketplace confernce website was built on a very tight timeline. This Laravel 5.2 web application includes the public fontend, attendee portal, and admin backend to manage the frontend content and to view/edit/delete all pertinent data. I worked very closesly with the design team (frontend only) to improve the user experience and user interface to ensure a pleasing enviornment for both attendee and admin users.

Completed: April 2016

Tags: Laravel, responsive web development, conference, UI, UX

etailzu

etailz.com

etailz.com has gone through three major revisons during my time at etailz, each revision providing an opportunity to improve the user experience. I work very closely with the design team during these revisions, inputting UX/UI suggestions, and ensuring the final product is exactly as wanted. This is the largest project I have built in Jekyll.

Completed: March 2016 (v3) - continually updated.

Tags: Jekyll, responsive web development, UI, UX

etailz

etailz Amazon Product Review Emails

The etailz Amazon Product Review Email proprietary software sends out targeted templated emails to all of the Amazon customers who purchase any etailz product. I updated this system from Laravel v4.2 to v5.2, restructured the database, improved query structure, and made vast improvments to the UI by adding graphs, calendars, specific queried tables, and exporting functionality.

Completed: January 2016

Tags: Laravel, UI, UX, Amazon MWS, HTML emails

etailz pre

blog.etailz.com

After the second revsion of etailz.com, the etailz blog was also updated. Built with Wordpress, the customized theme is built so blog posts can be written with very minimal knowledge of HTML.

Completed: Fall 2015

Tags: Wordpress, responsive web development, blog

etailz

vaultelectronics.com

I built this site in it's entireity. The goal of vault electronics is to stand out from the typical ecommerce experience. Together with the design team, we created a unqiue user interface with subtle modern improvements, that still hark to the traditional elements of eccommerce sites to keep the user experience simple and predictive.

Completed: Summer 2015 - continually updated.

Tags: Magento, responsive web development, ecommerce, electronics

vaultelectronics

coybeauty.com

This was my first project with Magento. I completed the last two-thirds of development for this site; working very closely with the etailz design team.

Completed: Spring 2015 - continually updated.

Tags: Magento, responsive web development, ecommerce, beauty

coybeauty

Skills


HTML

proficient

CSS/SASS

proficient

JQuery/Javascript

proficient

PHP

proficient

MySQL

proficient

AJAX

proficient

Laravel

proficient

Jekyll

proficient

Magento

proficient

Wordpress

proficient

Adobe Photoshop

proficient

MailChimp/Mandrill

proficient

JSON

comfortable

Linux

comfortable

Apache

comfortable

Java

comfortable

XML

comfortable

UML

comfortable

Adobe CC

comfortable

GIT

comfortable

Amazon MWS

comfortable

MailGun

comfortable

C#

FAMILIAR

Python

FAMILIAR

ASP .NET

FAMILIAR

LINQ

FAMILIAR

Grunt

FAMILIAR

Vagrant

FAMILIAR

Homestead

FAMILIAR