Skills and Qualifications
30,000 feet
Team Leadership
My leadership style is primarily Servant Leadership, mixed with Transformational and Coach styles.¹ I believe org charts should be drawn upside-down, with leaders respecting, supporting, and empowering their teams, and I apply this principle diligently to keep my teams effective and in high morale.
¹ https://ca.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/leadership-styles
Strategy
Effective user experience design isn’t creating nice products for end-users. It’s incorporating users into the design process, designing an effective UX team, refining how that team interacts and collaborates with its peers, institutionally supporting a user-centered approach, and presenting a unified, design-forward culture to the market as a whole.
Research and Design Ops
Every dollar and every minute spent on support and facilitation of effective, modern research and design pays for itself many times over. I have experience establishing empowered, cross-disciplinary teams that multiply the effectiveness and efficiency of research and design efforts.
Education, Advocacy, and Culture Building
We are all creating the user experience. This mantra has served me throughout my career, and I work tirelessly to educate and advocate for UX on all levels, communicating the value and impact of data-driven UX, delivering seminars to raise UX competency throughout the company, and sharing information and ideas both inside and outside the organization.
300 feet
Design Systems
I have experience leading and executing on the building and maintaining of comprehensive design systems, consisting of style guides, pattern libraries, code repositories, processes, and documentation. Together with robust Design Ops, these ensure consistency and efficiency in all design work, even across platforms and properties.
Unified User Journeys
Even with multiple products, platforms, and audiences, it’s important to maintain a big-picture view of the users, their journeys, and how a family of products or services may touch and interact with them. Persona libraries, user journeys, flow maps, and other tools help tie together disparate ideas into a cohesive whole.
Mentorship
My most rewarding professional experiences are when I am able to help guide and grow a UX professional from junior to senior, senior to lead. Few things benefit a person or an organization more than internal growth, not just through increased effectiveness as a professional, but also through greatly increased morale and job satisfaction.
UX Process Design and Agile/Lean UX
There is no canonical UX process. We have, at most, a toolkit, a set of goals, and the circumstances in which we need to meet them. With these, I have experience crafting UX processes to meet institutional needs on both long and (punishingly) short timelines, adapting methodologies for rapidly changing scenarios (COVID, anyone?), and aligning UX with Agile development.
3 feet
User Research
I have worked nearly two decades in UX, and from the very start of my career, I have designed, executed, analyzed, and directed formative and summative research, using qualitative and quantitative methods across countless projects. This leads to designs that are more than just data-driven, but also modern, empathic, and even delightful.
Interaction Design
Low-fidelity wireframes, high-fidelity designs, interactive prototypes, and everything in between have a place in UX. As best suits the resources and opportunities at hand, I have led and executed all of these methods as part of processes on mobile, web, and desktop applications.
Information Architecture
Designing and validating the architecture of a site, app, or other product is a complex task that must take into account psychology, research, design trends and best practices, SEO, technology, and many other concerns. From site maps and navigation to card sorting and tree testing, I have end-to-end expertise in building effective information architectures.
Cognitive Psychology
I have extensive education and experience around applied cognitive psychology, the mental ergonomics underlying usability, persuasion, attention, and communication. These validated principles drive my execution, oversight, and review of every design decision made by me or my team.
Work Experience
Director of UX Strategy, SmileDirectClub
As Director of User Experience Strategy at SmileDirectClub, I was the highest-level user experience leader in the organization, reporting to the VP of Digital Experience and leading a team of UX researcher/designers.
My team was responsible for requirements gathering, user research, design, visual QA, and support, review, and consultation for implementation across both the site and mobile app using an Agile workflow. Together, we launched a full site redesign and design system along with a cutting-edge AI/ML mobile 3D scanning tool and many other app and site features and updates.
Key accomplishments: Launched “Site 2.0” headless redesign/replatform on new SmileDirectClub design system, achieved conversion increase of ~50% with launch of AI/ML-powered mobile 3D scanning tool
Key responsibilities: Full UX department leadership including site/app feature and flow direction, research design and execution, interaction and visual design, internal user experience strategy and planning
Check out the SmileDirectClub SmileScanner Case Study
2021-2023
Head of User Experience, Matchpoint NY
At Matchpoint, I led all company-wide UX research and interaction design, defining a cohesive agency strategy and ethic of excellence, and growing profit and client portfolio year-over-year.
I managed the UX responsibilities of a small team of internal and contracted personnel and worked with them to formalize, design, and execute UX capabilities and processes representative of our full-scope offerings. These included strategy, design workshops, qualitative/quantitative research, information architecture, interaction design, email marketing, and a proprietary, premium usability testing workshop for large-scale enterprise clients.
This role was client-facing and included delivering pitches, artifacts, decks, and workshops to leads, client stakeholders, and contacts including C-suite executives, Agile and non-Agile development teams, and marketing.
Key accomplishments: Increased agency revenue 5x year-over-year with repeat clients such as J. Jill and Staples, decreased Dermablend product returns by 56% with improved shade selector, and increased page views by 18% and decreased bounce rate by 9% with IAB site redesign
Key clients: Staples, J. Jill, IAB, Brother USA, L’Oreal, Godiva, SiriusXM
Key output: Strategic decision-making and leadership, per-client customized design process plans, study designs and research execution and analysis, presentation decks, wireframes and prototypes, email marketing strategies and test plans, pitches, proposals, and contract documents
Check out the Staples Usability Testing Case Study
2016-2021
Lead User Experience Researcher, Ipreo (now IHS Markit)
Key accomplishments: Created persona library in use company-wide for 4+ years, possibly still in use today
Key output: Company-wide, interdepartmental persona library; UX department design and engagement process and documentation; internal UX educational materials and presentations; study designs and research execution and analysis; SME interviews and requirements; wireframes and prototypes
Check out the Ipreo Persona Library Case Study
2014-2016
For more detailed information and pre-2014 work history: