Experience

Principal Product Designer

Oracle, 2018 - Present

Leading UX design, research, and strategy for a team that builds complex internal tools for members of OCI's data center operations and build teams. I manage design across 4 applications, integrating tightly with my engineering and PM counterparts to ensure consistent, reusable processes that make it easier for our colleagues to do their jobs. I also consult with our other teams to provide design input on their applications. Currently embarked on a large research effort to define a parent system that will tie all the various applications in use by cloud teams together under one login, provide guided workflows and hand-offs, track projects, surface dashboards that give a “state of the union,” and ultimately use a proactive, rather than reactive, approach to keeping our Cloud running at peak performance.

As a sole designer in an engineering-led environment, a large portion of my work is educating other team members on the design process, including higher-ups, and the value it can provide. I've established processes for teams to work with design and built strong relationships to ensure we are always building the right thing for our users, and in a way that will scale for future needs. It's meant advocating for the time needed to do the proper work, involving stakeholders in shared ideation sessions, and then demonstrating value through impactful deliverables.

I also serve as a “bartender” for OCI’s candidate hiring process, ensuring quality and standards in the hiring process, eliminating biases and driving consensus during debriefs, and overall upholding positive candidate experiences.

Senior Product Designer

Apptio, 2017-2018

As a member of a small but mighty product design team in the enterprise SaaS space, my work touched multiple products across the IT and Finance applications. I conducted competitive research and customer interviews to build user stories and journey maps, which I turned into prototypes we tested with our customers. I then worked with our top-notch development teams to ensure the build is up to our customer standards. Of course, along the way I contributed to design team initiatives such as an overhaul of our visual and interaction design pattern libraries, and development of design team guiding principles. I also mentored junior team members and evangelized the benefits of design partners and usability testing as our company matured into its second decade.

Senior Product Designer

Vertafore, 2014-2017

Lead designer for ImageRight, an enterprise cloud-based document and task management application used by insurance agencies and carriers to manage documents and complete tasks in pre-programmed steps to ensure compliance. Translated desktop version into a cloud-based application. New key features I designed include an Optical Character Recognition forms definer, OCR forms validation, audit history reporting, content packaging/sending, manual redaction, and keyboard shortcuts. I regularly met with our customers to gather research and test prototypes, and I led design sessions with them at our conferences to identify and prioritize functionality they needed.

Additionally, I mentored junior designers through smaller pieces of larger features while they built up their team and project handling skills.

Lead designer for Client Portal, an electronic portal for an insurance agency's customers to verify coverages, request policy changes, print auto ID cards, manage certificates of insurance, upload or download documents, and create custom content pages. Agencies can brand their portals with their own colors, logos, and fonts, assign user-level permissions for certain actions and page access, and customize automatic emails the system sends out. The portal is integrated into the agency management software, requiring tight coordination with those teams to both build our functionality within their system and to develop APIs. When I joined the team a rough beta version was in place and I built up the architecture and functionality to a robust v1 release that steadily increased in sales over the 4 years I was there and became the most popular add-on product.

Contract UX Designer

Amazon, 2013-2014

I was brought on to a new team to help flesh out the concept for a shopping and gift advice feature. The project manager had a solid idea of what the feature would be, but not a lot of other requirements. I did the initial competitive research and flow maps for how it could work, and vetted possible functionality with the development team. With a more complete picture in place, I began wireframing out a first version that included capabilities like commenting on, and up or down voting, suggestions, and then prototyping out basic interactions. It was a fun project but, to my knowledge, it never went live.

Creative & Online Marketing Director

LightSword Media, 2012-2013

LightSword Media was the creative and marketing branch for a portfolio of small companies in the financial services industry. I led the strategies and implementation on that front, providing UX and web design, copywriting, front-end coding, email and SMS marketing, SEO, landing page optimization, and brand guideline development. Additionally, I established relationships with outside development teams to build out larger features requiring backend database work, and I hired and managed other freelance professionals for larger projects.

Contract Senior Visual Designer

AT&T Mobility, 2011-2012

Working within strict brand guidelines, and utilizing advanced image editing and device compositing skills, I created designs for marketing campaigns, HTML emails, and new site pages. Additionally, I collaborated with marketing on promotional ideas and offers and contributed designs to the internal design pattern library.

Interactive Designer

Redmond Technology Partners, 2010-2011

Designed websites, UIs for interactive applications, HTML emails, and sales collateral for a variety of large companies such as Microsoft and F5. Wrote front-end code for websites and HTML emails. Managed client relationships, project estimates, budgets, and timelines. Successful project deliverables helped secure our yearly contracts and bring in new work.

Contract UI Designer

ING Direct/ShareBuilder, 2010

Part of a team working on the ShareBuilder site re-design. We completely re-architected the site and designed new navigation flows. Individually, I built out several interactive site financial tools and created marketing-focused landing pages. I also picked up the last phase of the v1 mobile application design and completed the mobile application style guide.

Art Director

Classmates, 2004-2009

I spent the first half of my tenure on the marketing team designing branded ad campaigns and landing pages for internal promotions, as well as for external promotions involving vendors like Walt Disney World, CBS, and Warner Brothers. My second half was spent on the UI team designing interfaces for site products like a Google mapping feature, Neighborhoods (akin to today's Nextdoor), reunion event planning, and photo uploading and tagging. In addition to contributing individually, I was responsible for overseeing other designers on both these teams to ensure we were all aligned on larger team goals, branding, and vision.

Web Designer

X10, 2000-2004

Here is where I first honed my advertising and marketing chops by making banner ads and landing pages and placing them into live campaigns and watching their numbers for successes and failures. My work spanned visual design, Flash animation, product photography, video editing, copywriting, and front-end coding. It generated over $500k in daily sales during our peak years.

 

Skills

  • UX & Product Design

  • User Research

  • Usability Testing

  • Information Architecture

  • Wireframing

  • Prototyping

  • Customer Journey Mapping

  • Task Flows & Diagrams

  • UI/Visual/Graphic Design

  • UX Writing & Editing

  • Product Strategy

  • Team Leadership

  • Collaboration & Building Consensus

  • Relationship Building

  • HTML & CSS

  • Figma, Axure, Adobe CC, Sketch

Higher Education

Western Governors University
Master of Science, Management and Leadership

Southern New Hampshire University
Bachelor of Arts, Graphic Design & Media Arts
Minor, Psychology

The Art Institute of Seattle
Associate of Applied Arts, Multimedia

Communities

Hexagon UX - I regularly participate as a mentor in the Mentor/Mentee cohorts held throughout the year. I enjoy giving back to the community and helping to guide others as they navigate their careers.

Rands Leadership Slack

Design Leadership Community

Ladies That UX

Seattle Designers

UX Seattle

Designer Hangout Slack

Rosenfeld Media Slack