Highlights

• Product innovation. Designed Dell.com’s responsive, personalized cart-and-checkout rollout and its end-to-end systems design. Created “zero build” for minimum viable product launch. Led the product’s growth to multiple global regions as a cross-platform, full-featured service. In 2015, Dell’s cart and checkout ranked 6th in the Baymard Institute’s UX research of 50 top mobile sites.

• Team mentorship. Excelled in directing design reviews for all ecommerce, content, and self-service projects on usaa.com – 170-220 projects annually, with a $100 million budget. Helped USAA rank No. 1 in BusinessWeek’s customer-service awards and Forrester’s internet customer-satisfaction study.

• UX design systems. Created, coded, documented, and maintained the design libraries for 2 Fortune 200 companies – Dell and USAA. Each library served more than 60 UX colleagues. At USAA, advised 24 teams as the single point of governance for all usaa.com, intranet and portal standards. For Magento, created its 1st content style guide, glossary database, and integrated help.

• Content strategy. Led 2 audits – design and content – of Magento’s ecommerce software platform. Created methodology for the UX team to capture 942 defects in 171 pages. Analyzed the defects, created Agile stories in Jira, prioritized / assigned work, and managed user testing.

Senior UX Designer

Amazon Business   |  2019 – present

• Created version 1.0 of the design library for Amazon Business. Picked up Sketch’s Design System Manager ( DSM ) software and ramped up quickly to take on the administrator role.

• Modularized the library by incorporating all color, design, and content page templates, components, and styles into Sketch’s library, shared with designers and developers. Engineered the shared library so a change to 1 design element will cascade to all library assets that use the element.

• In lauching version 2.0, changed course to use Figma’s design library software, dropping Sketch. Made the case to switch after several months of evaluating DSM’s limitations and bugs.

• Improved site navigation to resolve poor customer experience in our larger, Enterprise clients. Analyzed customer analytics to identify the problems in “findability” for 1000s of pages, as well as the finding of poor efficiency in handling repetitive tasks.

• Created nav modules on pages, based on the page template used. Created a dynamic, high-fidelity prototype to test against a sample of current enterprise customers. The project passed with participants praising the experience. The project ended a 3-year struggle to develop a usable and intuitivev design solution.

Senior UX Designer, Onboarding

Charles Schwab   |  2018 – 19

• Designed, user-tested, and coordinated the launch of Schwab’s digital accelerators initiative – a new platform to replace the legacy system and to introduce funds transfers while opening accounts. The minimum viable product / zero launch started with brokerage accounts. Proposed features designed to scale for future sprints.

• Rolled out “fast-follower” feature upgrades, including application flows for traditional, Roth, and rollover IRAs; save-and-resume functionality; and primary and backup beneficiaries.

• Participated in and facilitated early design-thinking sessions with stakeholders and project team members, designing prototypes to be validated in bi-weekly moderated user testing, unmoderated remote testing, and multivariate testing.

• Created specs for information architecture, interaction design, page templates, design patterns / components, data entities, and content standards for errors, messaging and statuses.

• Collaborated with developers to ensure production code meets UX specs and coordinated final designs among stakeholders, integrators, and approvers.

Senior UX Designer + Content Strategist

Magento Commerce   |  2016 – 18   view portfolio  ›

• Integrated a new Amazon Marketplace tool into Magento’s ecommerce software. The tool enabled clients to access and sync with global Amazon Marketplaces, “A.I.” pricing, order handling, and customer data. Created a journey map, test plan, task flows, navigation, taxonomy, UI components, and content. Developed strategy to simplify and improve the legacy onboarding UX.

• Redesigned the software’s sales-promotion functionality, converting a complicated and unorganized rules set into basic templates for users to use immediately or easily change and customize.

• Provided oversight as primary reviewer and mentor for content across UX design and documentation teams. Designed responsive templates and specs to standardize developer documentation.

• Authored and edited the Magento Stylebook, Glossary, and Word Usage Bank. Designed modular contextual help to dynamically populate on pages their glossary terms and explainers. Funcionality was built to scale across platforms.
   

Lead UX Architect, Ecommerce

Dell  |  Also, Design System Manager | 2009 – 16    view portfolio  ›

• Directed Dell’s cart-and-checkout UX project work as the lead and subject-matter expert for a 5-person team, running Agile methodology. Integrated design and technical dependencies across multiple platforms. Scaled functionality to global regions. Designed and presented future-state strategies. Managed builds and integration of global / regional payments, split-payments, subscriptions, rewards, and account management.

• Conducted competitive analysis, directed user testing (A/B, multivariate, and moderated usability), and sketched low-fidelity task flows and wireframes. Crafted and coordinated high-fidelity prototypes and content models annotated with specifications. Led team in project deadline delivery and presentation to extended teams and executives.

• Awarded Dell’s Silver Award for architecting a new, next-generation design library to govern the world’s 2nd-largest ecommerce website. Created, edited, and published guides, components (with visual and interaction specs), page templates, content-management templates, site taxonomy, and support materials to instruct internal and external design teams.

• Designed sitemaps, wireframes, interaction specs, and other documentation for Dell.com’s product configurator, product comparison tool, a Q&A advice application, and Facebook / social-media strategy. Created specs and schematics for enterprise sales-collaboration portal proposal, intended to replace Salesforce.
   

Lead, UX Design System & Governance

USAA   |  2001 – 08    view portfolio  ›

• Provided web design and content expertise, including 3 years of oversight for more than 400 complex financial services content and transactional projects. Collaborated with business, marketing, legal, user testing, and development stakeholders in designing usable and engaging web applications.

• Created wireframes, content models, and prototypes for ecommerce projects, including interactive diamond-and-ring shopping tool ( generated 22,000 sessions, monthly ), and templated experiences for combined quote-and-apply experiences for auto, life, and renter insurance ( increased conversion 32% ).

• Designed implementation specs for Documentum content management system to run USAA’s 6,000 web pages, including content syndication and workflow for USAA News Center stories. Led content-centric projects, including creation of retirement, life events, and life insurance sitelets.

• Directed business-critical, daily reviews for all web projects going to production. Reviews included extensive knowledge of the design and content standards for all platforms — usaa.com, mobile, work portal, and intranet. Learned subject-matter expertise for all lines of USAA business, including banking, investments, shopping, and auto, home, and life insurance.

Information Architect

Deloitte Consulting   |  2000 – 01

Planned sites for external clientele, including Parago, Pantellos, and Lafarge clients. Interviewed users and stakeholders, gathered requirements, and built use cases. Led teams from conceptual stages through site implementations. Supervised designers and coders to ensure our clients’ goals were met.

Producer, Designer, Editor + Reporter

Statesman.com + Austin American-Statesman   |  1996 – 2000

• Web Producer, 1999 – 2000

  Planned and created news and interactive sports coverage for Austin American-Statesman’s website. Coordinated a team of correspondents covering high school, college, and NFL football. Increased weekend page views by 35 percent. … Helped set traffic records, finishing second only to WashingtonPost.com in market penetration (Forrester, March 2000). ... Managed University of Texas and Big 12 Conference message boards.

• Editor + Designer, 1997 – 99

  Wrote copy, edited stories, and designed pages for sports and features daily fronts and special sections – all on strict deadlines. As Neighbor Sports editor, coordinated photos and freelancers and managing the section’s budget.

• Freelance Reporter for Texas State University Sports, 2000 – 10

Also: Wrote college-football features, for Dave Campbell’s Texas Football Magazine.

Collaboration

• GitHub

• Slack

• Jira

• Mural

• Trello

• TFS

Design + Prototyping

• Figma

• Sketch

• Justinmind

• Axure

• Adobe Creative Suite

• MS Office + Visio

Content Management

• Confluence

• SharePoint

• WordPress

• Documentum

Business

• Adobe Analytics

• Google Analytics

• Tableau

Code

• HTML / CSS

• Atom editor

• Markdown

Associations

• User Experience Professionals Assn.

• Intl. Assn. of Accessibility Professionals

• Interaction Design Assn.

• Information Architecture Institute

• Kappa Sigma Fraternity, Mu Gamma Chapter

• Former Journalism Student Assn., Texas A&M

• National Eagle Scout Assn.