I am an accomplished leader of user experience who drives cross-team creativity, collaboration, and inclusive environments. I have thrived by specializing in both UX design and research, having mentored others and led teams in both sets of skills. I am seeking an organization where I can impact company culture while directing the creation of user interactions that are engaging and easy to use.
EXPERIENCE
Human Centered Design: Sr. UX Generalist, 2023 - present
Bill and Melinda Gates FoundationFacilitated user research and design projects for Human Centered Design group while collaborating with team members to expand best practices and share learnings.
Project examples
- Knowledge Management: I designed and performed user research for an AI-driven search experience focused on exploring and discovering internal insights and documentation.
- Partner Portal: I conducted a global investment experience discovery, learning how engagement and collaboration occurred across a variety of interaction experiences. This information helped in determining business capabilities and technical systems required for a potential portal for managing investments.
- Printing initiative: I combined deep knowledge of users, usability heuristics, and UX/UI patterns to assess the international printing experience, incorporating constraints into user interaction improvements.
Director of UX, 2020 - 2022
Aperture.aiSpearheaded design and user research at a fast-based startup focused on revolutionizing innovation by leveraging complicated AI systems to help companies identify new market opportunities.
- Led a cross-functional team of designers and front-end engineers to create a collaborative, supportive environment with impactful customer solutions following a user-centered, agile process.
- Determined user needs and goals through user research, transforming creative and business objectives into desired interaction flows, which informed the final implementation.
- Enabled greater speed for prototype creation and product development by originating an atomic design pattern library of essential components within Figma for React programming development.
- Directed organizational priorities, product objectives and features via short- and long-term roadmaps generated through company-wide and small group workshops. These roadmaps were essential guides for focusing the different teams into producing the desired end product.
Sr. Researcher, 2019 - 2020
UpTopGuided research consulting projects that informed a major financial management corporation’s product and marketing strategies.
- Conducted workshops with stakeholders to determine business goals, success criteria, and research questions which were then used to determine methodology for the studies.
- Analyzed and shared research insights to executives that clarified usability needs, user-desired features, and recommended persona segmentation for sales groups.
Principal Interaction Designer, 2012 - 2019
Blink UXLed design and research projects for an award-winning, evidence-driven design agency. My role on projects included stakeholder workshops, user research, strategic brainstorms, interactive prototypes, iterations, and building out the designs.
Project examples
- Moen’s Smart Shower: I led the design, user research, and development of a voice-enabled smart shower that worked for multiple external voice-interactive products. The shower was named one of “The 30 Most Innovative Products of 2019” by Better Homes and Gardens.
- NASA Distributed Active Archive Centers: I oversaw a massive, interdisciplinary research project focused on helping scientists easily access data. From the collected data, I created scientist personas and design solutions. The implemented designs allowed for faster data access, and the personas were circulated to help educate departments across NASA.
- Google Remote Desktop: I directed the design and research for this product, which had the challenge of having multiple conflicting interactions. This product continues to thrive, and the project led to our company having a significant contract with Google.
