Résumé

Summary

Resourceful team member advocate, adept at Agile environments, and passionate user advocate seeking to leverage deep and wide UX background into a principal product designer or UX team management/leadership role for a progressive, user-centric, UX-mature organization. Results-focused product design leader and UX management professional with 10+ years of experience in research and design who can collaborate strategically with product, marketing and software development to ship product. Outgoing and action-oriented idea and concept presenter experienced in partnering with cross-functional teams to craft future initiatives and break them down into quantifiable team tasks. Comfortable with ambiguity. Team player capable of recruiting, hiring and leading teams, delegating, creating design systems to improve velocity, training staff, and monitoring performance to ensure results.

Key career highlights & contributions

  • Improved efficiency by dramatically reducing internal workflow of regularly scheduled funding requests, thus streamlining operational efficiency in a previously time-consuming manual daily process, steps required per customer from 18 down to 4, saving 4 staff members each an average of 8 hours/week.
  • Designed an online flow to apply for funding that reduced manual time by internal staff by 15 hours per application, earning a rating by users of 4.7 out of 5 for ease of use.
  • Redesigned workflows to accommodate enterprise clients processing thousands of funding requests in the adtech sector where the initial B2B product had been designed primarily for SMBs with typically less than 100 records at any given time.
  • Redesigned the entire laboratory setup process for clinical diagnostics lab techs from 12 steps per test to 1 step (for 85% of users), dramatically reducing setup time required for enterprise laboratories with thousands of tests, saving up to hundreds of hours in setup for customer labs and reducing go-live by an average of one week.
  • Streamlined workflow for users based on analysis of session replay data that showed almost 50% were taking 8 clicks to obtain the same information every day in a report, providing that information upon login on a new dashboard.
  • Identified a number of product features that were being underutilized by clients through analysis of Mixpanel flows, providing a plan to reduce complexity and save developer resources from maintaining unused features.
  • Developed a set of user personas by sifting through previous research, drafting a plan to validate elements of those profiles through user interviews and delivering a set of personas that were fewer in number but with more actionable information.
  • Led design of a new greenfield product for health information tech users to allow AI analysis of their clinical decision support content, matching their content with new gold standard content, eliminating the need for research and hours of review by busy clinical professionals to update content for EMRs.
  • Developed artifacts including site maps, user journeys, wireframes, comps/mockups, design systems, prototypes (Sketch, Figma, Invision, hand-coded HTML/CSS/JS), UX documentation, UX process flows and triage engineering, Agile product development process use cases/stories, and use-case-related QA issues.

Key skills: Leadership | Mentoring | Visioning | Communication & collaboration | User advocate | Data-driven design | Domestic & international UX testing & beta feedback | Cross-disciplinary initiatives | Stakeholder engagement | Presentation | Facilitation | Negotiation | Requirements development | Competitive intelligence | Heuristic evaluation | Task-completion studies | Usability testing | Workflow analysis | UX evangelization | Persona development | Session-replay analysis | Material Design | Mobile product guidelines | Consumerization of enterprise applications | Interaction design

Career history

Walmart

Jun 2022 – present

Designer Lead

Working on the Enterprise team

Arcules

Irvine, CA | Jun 2021-Jun 2022

Principal UX Designer

  • Lead the UX team at this international cloud video security SaaS startup owned by Canon ($33 billion annual revenue), including senior UX designer and UX intern, providing mentoring, design review, goal-setting and performance evaluation.
  • Participate as member of cross-functional Tiger Team planning company transformation, collaborating with CEO and CTO on new customer-centered initiatives.
  • Draft and track KPIs to measure business impact of UX through Mixpanel flow analysis and GetFeedback results.
  • Lead establishment of standing user testing recruitment program to maximize user input into product by standardizing process, proposed and led international user training initiative (Japan), instituted research and implementation of user personas.
  • Work collaboratively with product managers, software engineers, marketing and sales teams to understand user needs and business goals in UX projects. Collaborate with sister companies in international joint ventures.
  • Take initiative to be certified in independent video surveillance industry course to better understand customer needs across the segment.

Bio-Rad Laboratories

Irvine, CA | Sep 2018-Jun 2021

See Bio-Rad projects

UX Design Lead

  • Revamped the entire laboratory setup process to dramatically reduce time required for enterprise laboratories with thousands of tests at this $2.2 billion global clinical diagnostics/life sciences company.
  • Addressed the problem of multiple similar configurations by researching appropriate defaults and common scenarios, providing those up front rather than requiring users to input the same information repeatedly.
  • Developed a database system for recruitment, taxonomic classification, acknowledgement and tracking of customer users to solve the problem of recruiting test participants in a sales-driven organization.
  • Interfaced with international offices (China) to conduct international user testing including prototype and script localization into Mandarin to support company’s strategy for expansion in China.
  • Designed, tested and iterated on UIs for conversion of flagship clinical diagnostics product from 30-year-old legacy on-prem server software with bolted-on features to modern cloud-based integrated SaaS SPA application, which at times required wholesale re-imagining of a feature from the ground up.
  • Initiated cross-disciplinary task force to drive creation and establishment of ongoing governance for a comprehensive design system to speed development, reduce bugs and ensure consistency.
  • Trained/coached team designers on design best practices, operational protocol, software functionalities, and tactics to maximize results, created an extensive Sketch symbol library for use by all team members in crafting UIs to reduce time spent per screen and ensure consistent UIs.
  • Worked hand-in-hand with software development team to increase sprint velocity by component-based UI development.

FastPay

West Hollywood, CA | May 2015 – Jan 2018

See FastPay projects

Senior UX Designer

  • Redesigned workflows to accommodate enterprise clients processing thousands of records at this fintech startup where the initial B2B product had been designed primarily for SMBs with typically less than 100 records at any given time.
  • Improved UX by dramatically reducing internal workflow from 18 steps to 5 steps, thus dramatically streamlining operational efficiency in a previously time-consuming daily process.
  • Analyzed user sessions, overturning previous assumptions about user workflows/objectives and optimized a common user workaround representing over 50% of visits to make it the primary workflow, greatly reducing steps through use of smart defaults.
  • Developed UX personas to identify gaps in product offerings and focus research and design.
  • Created design system in collaboration with marketing and software development to speed development, reduce bugs and ensure consistent UIs.
  • Provided foundational guidance to early-stage product requirements, partnered with software development team to ensure high-quality UI; designed and iterated on prototypes and screens to guide development of product features.

Zynx Health, a division of Hearst Health

Los Angeles | April 2011 – May 2015

See Zynx projects

UX Designer

  • Created role of UX evangelist in organization, developing an interdisciplinary advisory group to advance organizational UX maturity model at this enterprise health information technology division of the $11.4 billion media giant.
  • Led design of clinical content analysis software, utilizing AI and NLP to guide hospital users in implementing best practices to reduce mortality and costs.

Product Engineer

  • Aided stakeholders for numerous concurrent projects by producing reports, communicating project status, deviations, or insights, and reporting KPIs, completions, and hours to help facilitate executive decision-making.
  • Delivered on-time and low-defect new products and product enhancements to a leading healthcare content management system.

Previous work history

  • Product Manager, Frequency Networks, Los Angeles | Nov 2009 – Apr 2011
  • Front End Engineer, GetBack Media (retro pop culture startup), Los Angeles, 2008-2009
  • Consultant (Project Manager/UX Designer/Front End Engineer), Various companies, Los Angeles, 1998-2008

Education

University of Southern California


Image: Unsplash, Joseph Ngabo

I also bake a mean pie.