User Experience designer

I am a User Experience professional with expertise in all phases of digital product design: from research and requirements gathering, to UX and UI design, through prototyping and user testing at all levels of fidelity, and front-end development, QA and UAT. I work with end users, developers, researchers, and project stakeholders to craft optimal experiences on desktop, web, and mobile and responsive platforms. I have managed the end-to-end design and development of products in both Lean and Agile environments for startups, mid-sized companies, and large US Federal Administrations. Also, I taught UX design and have training in data science. I bring empathy to every project and I am passionate about leveraging design thinking to make people’s lives better.

Core skillsets

• User experience (UX)

• Service design (SX)

• User research

• Information Architecture (IA)

• Design systems

Professional experience

Product design, Social Security Administration (April 2022 — Current)

Product, User Experience,  User Interface, and Content design for ssa.gov. Formalized web design system, built out and maintained a new extensible design system library using Figma variables. User research and user testing. Guiding SSA subject matter experts through design thinking exercises and design process to actualize new projects within the modernization effort.

Projects include:

Header and footer rework, Homepage update, Eligibility for benefits screener, Field office locator, Representatives sub site, Mobile navigation rework, Site alerts update, About page rework, Complete blog rework, Login page redesign, Scams and Fraud content rework, Office appointment scheduler, Other languages resource page, FAQ section rework.

UX design instructor

General Assembly (Fall 2016 — Spring 2017, July 2021 — April 2022)

GW University College of Professional Studies (Feb 2018 — Aug 2018)

Taught all aspects of UX design, prototyping and research basics for students. Responsible for delivering and developing lectures and classroom activities. Coached students, gave feedback on projects and coursework.

Application Specialist, Eidosmedia (Jan 2019 — August 2020)

As a lead UX and UI designer and applications developer for Eidosmedia, I develop streamlined, user-specific views of the company’s internationally- used content and workflow management system (CMS), for desktop, web and mobile deployment. My work includes requirements gathering, researching user needs, designing the UX and UI, prototyping at all levels of fidelity, coding customized experiences using the Méthode platform, and user testing and adjusting as needed.

For the Congressional Research Service I designed user dashboards, designed and developed a metadata control panel, and designed and developed a responsive dynamic web content output template. For Cushman Wakefield I designed a responsive web output for a complicated data table. For CIO (IDG Digital Communications Inc) I also create and code complex prototypes for business development purposes.

Senior UX designer, Freddie Mac (Aug 2018 — December 2018)

UX and UI design of customer-facing platform for mortgage industry seller and servicer applicants to the Freddie Mac marketplace. UX and UI design of internal platform to review and process applications, conducted ongoing oversight of current business partners, administered components of the external facing application, gathered project requirements, conducted user research and testing, and produced style guides, wireframes, functional specifications and interactive prototypes.

UX designer, Zansors (April 2014 - April 2017)

Web and mobile app design for a healthcare startup. Managed small design and development team. Designed Help4, a mobile platform for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and symptom management for chronic conditions. UX products include: Zansors.com, Help4 Insomnia and Help4 Smoking apps, and Zerify sleep sensor interface. Deliverables: requirements documentation, formative research, concept models, personas, wireframes, flows, UI designs, functional specs, design asset library, prototypes, user test plans, QA, UAT. Wrote algorithm for patented sleep restriction therapy recommendation engine

Freelance UX designer (Jan2017 - Current)

Jason Walker Percussion | jconga.com

Complete redesign of current website, including establishing a new url, brand identity, and organizing and implementing functionality like email capture, contact form, purchasing and scheduling lessons, video library, etc.

Strategic Technology Assessment | stagov.com

Website redesign/custom front-end, content management, and migration from Wordpress to Squarespace for stagov.com.

Enterprising Women Magazine

Design and development of Money Day 2018 website for Enterprising Women Magazine conference

Gastro Girl | gastrogirl.com

Worked with stakeholders, designed sitemap, wireframes, functional specifications and design asset library for online community, store, and medical directory for healthcare startup. 10-day turnaround.

Education

Data Science Certificate - General Assembly (2015)

BS in Mathematics - Eberly School of Science, Penn State University (May 2010)

Skills

UX · UI · SX · CX · IA

• WCAG 2.2, Section 508

• Design systems, style guides

• Design system libraries w/ Figma variables

• Nomenclature and naming conventions

• Task and Process Flows

• User testing (formative and summative)

• In-person moderated testing

• Remote moderated testing

• Remote unmoderated testing

• Concept Models and Mental Model Diagrams

• Personas

• User Journey mapping

• Experience mapping

• Prototyping — rapid/low fidelity

• Prototyping — interactive/responsive

• Prototyping —  front-end

• Collaborative design (including stakeholders, technical and non-technical team members in the design process)

Front end development

• HTML5

• CSS3

• JS

• jQuery

Software & other

• Figma

• Xd

• Sketch

• InVision

• Axure RP

• Omnigraffle

• Photoshop

• Python

• Anaconda

• Mathematica