Invested in creators
Design Lead
Working alongside product owners, I’ve spent years piloting a design vision and scaling design work across a team. It’s equal parts challenging and rewarding, while helping drive deep subject matter expertise in any given product, and user base.
Manager
I’ve had the pleasure of working with some extraordinary and talented designers during my tenure. Whether I’m working to unblock day-to-day issues, help them pursue their professional goals, or deal with the swings and complications of deadlines, it’s helped me see business operations in an entirely new light.
Mentor
Starting in 2010 I began volunteering time with the U of M Mentorship program and for 3 years served on the School of Design Alumni Board, to help work with students as they prepare for their career in design. We hosted various studio tours to show what we do and answer any questions they had.
Driving Organizational Change
Design Sprints
Design thrives on constraints, and time is routinely the number one constraint. I established and championed an Agile design process to scope and deliver on user stories.
This process required that design iterate one to two sprints ahead of development and participated routinely in story grooming. I lined up all needed stakeholders and executed on a bi-weekly cadence that involved:
Upfront sketching and collaboration with an internal critique
Three days of design iteration and finalization
Initial review with our product owner
A report out to the dev team with feedback
Final revisions on design work
Student Outreach
To help engage with the community and broaden our exposure, I championed the first set of student tours in our Golden Valley headquarters. This required buy-in from various stakeholders, organizing what was initially a multiple-day engagement.
Over time we refined that engagement to an annual activity filled day including individual interviews and an afternoon design challenge.
Students provided great feedback and as a team we were able to grow by teaching.
Smoke and Mirrors
At Honeywell we make products that live in the home and at times need to draw a users attention, while at other times needs to fade into the background.
To accomplish this goal of building user interfaces without screens, I pioneered a practice using single board computers to test audio, video and lighting interactions in hardware prototypes.
This fostered new research techniques and an early engagement with engineering to drive decisions on the materials used in our products.
Digging Into the What
We started participating in more fundamental conversations around the data models that drive our experiences. By doing so we were better equipped to have informed conversations during design review with engineering.
We were also better able to understand where some inconsistencies lie at a fundamental level and drive for consistent user experience patterns across our application.
Standardizing Operations
One Template
Every time you work with a design agency, you expect similar results. You shouldn’t need to learn a new layout, or adjust to a new style of wires or flows. I established a boilerplate template and worked with another designer to share with the studio.
One Set of Tools
One of the greatest struggles in Digital Product Design is an ever-evolving set of tools that can get the same job done in various ways. I worked with another designer to help survey the studio and compare tools.
One Destination for Research
I worked hand-in-hand with our research team and another designer to build out a platform to house, categorize and search for user insights that had been collected over the years.