Resume

• Team leadership: grew the UX Research team from 1 to 4, hiring, onboarding, and managing researchers; built team operations from the ground up, including onboarding processes, working agreements, and team goals. (Building a UX Research Team)
• Research strategy: set UX research strategy and operations for the organization, aligning research priorities with product and business goals.
• Cross-functional partnership: spearheaded company-wide communication and partnerships across research, design, and product leadership to ensure insights informed key product and business decisions.
• Mentorship: coached researchers on methodology, stakeholder communication, and career growth.

• Design leadership: provided staff-level design leadership across product teams, taking on expanded responsibilities including mentoring junior designers and leading project strategy.
• Team operations: assisted the UX Director with team operations and decisions, helping shape processes and best practices across the design org.
• Product influence: guided the design team on key product decisions and championed design best practices org-wide.

• Full-cycle UX design: led user research, wireframing, prototyping, information architecture, and usability testing across multiple product teams.
• Cross-functional delivery: partnered closely with product management and engineering throughout the product development process to drive design-led solutions.

• Business ownership: founded and ran an independent UX design consultancy serving small agencies, marketing departments, and web design firms without in-house UX capability.
• Embedded UX partnership: integrated directly into client teams as acting UX designer for website projects, delivering full UX design, digital UX/usability audits, consultation, and QA testing.
• Client roster: delivered UX work for national and global brands including Tyson Pet Products (Nudges, True Chews), WM Barr (DampRid, Goof Off), Eli Lilly/Elanco, Sprint, University of Maryland Baltimore, Alaska Railroad, Smith Optics, Sylvania Automotive, The Fresh Market, Party City, Church & Dwight (OxiClean, Nair, Orajel), and Cisco.

• UX design: developed personas, user flows, information architecture, wireframes, and prototypes for a broad range of agency clients.
• User research: planned and executed user testing (remote moderated, remote unmoderated, and in-person moderated), including test plans, scripts, and participant recruitment; evaluated and presented findings and recommendations.
• Project scoping: defined project scope, technical approach, and deliverables; wrote statements of work and requirements documents; sourced and evaluated external development partners.

• Project management: managed interactive projects, coordinating between clients, account service, creative, media staff, and outside vendors.
• Strategy & resourcing: partnered with the VP of Digital Strategy to determine workflow and the right mix of in-house and outside resources for each project.
• Client development: developed estimates and proposals for clients and prospects; monitored and reported on the effectiveness of online and email campaigns and web traffic.
• Production & vendor management: produced HTML and web graphics; managed vendor relationships and ongoing content management for client websites.

UX Certificate, Interaction Design & User Research — Nielsen Norman Group, Chicago, IL • Aug 2014 – Dec 2015

Course in Conducting Usability Testing — Interaction Design Foundation • Mar 2017 – May 2017

Course in Inputs and Interactions — UC San Diego (Coursera) • Mar 2016 – May 2016

Course in Human Computer Interaction — Stanford University (Coursera) • Aug 2012 – Dec 2012

Bachelor of Fine Arts, Graphic Design — University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS • Aug 1988 – May 1992