I've built and led successful design teams, worked with business leaders to develop new product concepts, and designed simple and innovative solutions to complex design problems.
I am a UX generalist with 30+ years leading teams, employing user centered design methods, and performing qualitative research. My sweet spot is SaaS solutions for small business and enterprise.
My passion is delivering designs that not only solve customer problems, but continually simplify and enhance the customer’s overall experience. My research examines each customer touch-point, not just the UX. My design experience is centered around Small Business, Security Management, Finance and Accounting, Supply Chain, Systems Management and Monitoring, and enterprise Telecommunications.
Throughout my 25+ year UX career, I have refined a design process at both the individual and organizational levels. Years of walking-the-walk, working with different teams, and observing how and when mistakes are made have helped mold these processes. These methods are key towards a workable UX Strategy and evolving the team over the UX Maturity Lifecycle.
I was a early pioneer in facilitating participatory, User Centered Design workshops, and intimately involved with the development of the Bridge Design Workshop, very similar to what is now known as "Design Thinking". At BellSouth, I started a program to incorporate laboratory, qualitative usability testing into enterprise application design.
At Jagger, my role is to tackle cross-portfolio product design, develop key team processes, and to mentor junior designers. Some of my accomplishments included redesigning the Information Architecture and navigation across the entire product portfolio, introducing team processes around research, story mapping, and design critique, and to redesigning the Supplier Profile/360 for buyer personas.
At Sage, my role as a Principal was to partner with key stakeholders to develop strategic product concepts, tackle complex design problems, nurture design processes within the team, and mentor junior designers. As a team lead, my teams designed key new features for Cloud Payroll and developed the concept for the next generation of reporting in Sage Accounting. As a team of 1, I redesigning the Bank Reconciliation feature for Sage Financials.
At AVG, I built and managed a design team for the SMB Security business distributed across the US, Canada, and the Czech Republic. my team performed research to assess customer interest in new SMB security offerings and designed prototypes to demonstrate a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). As these prototypes evolved into products, my team worked with engineering to define a hierarchy of user stories, then deliver design as an integrated member of the Agile team.
At Sun, I led distributed teams designing innovative solutions for systems management/monitoring and for providing a set of integrated services that promoted collaboration around open source projects.
As a consultant at Usability Management, I worked directly with clients such as Sun Microsystems, AC Nielsen, IBM, Nations Bank, Motorola to perform qualitative and quantitative product research, define organizational practices, and facilitate User Centered Design workshops using the Bridge Design Methodology.
At BellSouth, I justified to management the first full-time UX position, the investment of $300k+ to develop the Bridge Design Workshop with Bell Communications Research, and $100k+ to fund laboratory based usability testing. These investments fundamentally changed how BellSouth approached design.
Although I've received awards throughout my career, I'm most proud of my recognition and participation in the Sun Engineering Enrichment and Development (SEED) program for employees consistently receiving a Superior performance rating. I was a SEED Mentor in 2004 and a SEED Participant in 2007.
I was awarded the BellSouth President's Silver Award. This award was presented to a small group of managers and analysts who were the catalyst around implementing solutions that moved BellSouth's development organization from CMM Level 1 to Level 2. My personal contribution was with implementation of Requirements Management.