My career started in grad school. At Indiana University I learned how to observe people, understand theory and develop concepts that make experiences useful, usable and exciting.
From Kohl's to Nationwide and now Possible I've led design for some of the most important products at each company. I've delivered small projects with impossibly tight turnarounds and huge projects with hundreds of stakeholders.
At Possible I led our effort to make credit accessible for everyone. Working at a startup means wearing multiple hats, at Possible I was able to design the physical card and mailer, write design requirements and have a voice in our company vision.
I'm open to new opportunities that allow me to have a big impact on a small design team.
My focus is on interaction design but I've built a well rounded generalist skillset over nearly a decade of design work.
Start with a vision that guides the project to some greater purpose. It's not a contract but a direction that the team, and the stakeholders, can get behind.
After prioritizing and delivering some of the efforts, we can be critical about the vision. What works and what doesn't? More importantly, why?
Building a North Star vision doesn't mean pausing work. It's about consistently moving and discovering the path forward with stakeholders and customers.
Launched 2022
Possible’s mission is to make finance fair. The customers are part of underserved and underbanked communities. Most customers have a low credit score or no credit at all. The company grew from 80 to about 120 during my time there and the design team fluctuated from 3 to 1 to 5 designers.
The card built on the success of the loan. Cardmembers can pause their payments and pay the full amount back over time. Unlike a loan, the card has no interest. Plus a revolving line of credit can improve a credit score more than a series of loans.
The loan product and the card product were very different. The loan relied on Autopay. There were no transactions to record. Payments were a specific amount and scheduled during sign up.
In contrast, the card needed to be activated. We had to show transactions, the balance, the payments, the payment dates and offer service options for fraud or lost cards. We reused the design system that was created for the loans but we had to expand on it.
In the spirit of a startups, we've been figuring it out as we go. I've had to fill in with Project Management skills and figure out how print design works on plastics on top of designing the experience and defining our vision.
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Launched 2021
For two years we tore down and rebuilt the foundation of what every Kohl's customer would see and, hopefully, few would notice. I created a modular e-commerce experience for one of the largest retailers in America. The work we did is core to the future of Kohl's and a great story of a cross-functional team dedicated to the customer.
The last update to Kohl's Cart and Checkout was made in 2014 in a waterfall process, with plenty of compromise. In 5 years features were bolted on, often with bespoke solutions for mobile, tablet, desktop and kiosk.
Customers expectations have changed since then, the gamification of sales and discounts is seen as a painfully opaque process. Often a customer will tell us they just want to know what they're paying. E-commerce was no longer a novel idea in 2020.
Customers know what a transaction should look like and the overwhelming options that Kohl's offers only add to the cognitive load, pushing sales away from the site.
One reason we had to start over was the diminishing returns changes were expensive and time consuming. To be successful we had to account not just for the immediate impact but the years of work that follow.
We landed on a modular system, each core idea has a self-contained module. The modules stack into pages. When something isn’t relevant, it’s not displayed. States can be changed, added or removed without changing the entire page. Customers can focus on a single primary action in each module.
Our summer was very busy, our team of 4 ended up releasing 16 live tests in 16 weeks with several more ready to go. We also released Save for Later and several other smaller updates in the same window.
Overall, we made the company about $90 million in incremental revenue with our goal being $150 million for 2020 (defined pre-pandemic). We were well on our way to meeting that goal and incrementing our way to our redesign.
After launching the full redesign conversion rates rose by 4% within the first week. What we thought would be a long process of monitoring turned out to be an instant hit with our customers.
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Nationwide Insurance asked me to lead some of the most talented people I've ever worked with as we redesigned and launched the flagship mobile app. I was the advocate for the customer with 7 development teams, a short budget and very little time.
We launched a beautifully modern experience so customers could pay their bills, file a claim and share their insurance ID cards. And it was modular so the business could easily deliver new value.
Launched 2017
At Nationwide the user experience design team is a consultant. We were 100% billable and, like an agency, if we lose a client because we don't deliver, we need to find a new client to pay our salaries. For this project, design discretion lies with the business. The process is driven heavily by the development teams and the goal is to get something out of the door.
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Launched 2020
Customers at Kohl's often need to carefully manage a budget. Often they'll have to buy some school supplies now and wait until payday for a pair of shoes. Without a way to save those items, it's incredibly difficult to remember and find them again a few weeks later.
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Launched 2018
There's little hope of staying ahead of 7 development teams with only one designer. I had to think on my feet and see patterns before they were reused.
I used that quick thinking to build a design system. I could spend time with the high value problems and let our developers build other screens without wireframes.
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