Side Projects
I took some time off, because I could feel burnout coming, but truly love UX/Product Design. My concern was not being able to come back if I burned out, so when I had some life-events pop up, I decided to take time off and deepen a few practices.
My morning is pretty quiet, I wake up relatively early, meditate, do some active breathing, and then get the dog for our morning walk.
I'm finished with my routines around 6AM (I didn't want it to interfere with normal day things).
Work Experience
Working with incredible people to create intuitive products that help individuals in developing countries to establish formal ownership of their homes and land.
Led the Design effort across Product by collaborating with stakeholders across the company, facilitating discovery sessions, and helping to define the roadmap.
👯 Team growth, hired 3 incredibly talented designers jr – sr level. Established regular cadence of design reviews & 1:1's.
Worked on several cross-functional teams, including Supplier Oasis, Overstock's B2B product that's the single point of entry for getting products onto the site.
Was part of a product design duo that supported the UX team (~25 product designers), working to close the gap between Design & Engineering.
Highlights -
• led the effort to streamline the design tools from 3 to 1
• migrating existing Sketch Library to Figma
• worked with limited development resources to get a minimum viable design system up for the FED team (components that passed code coverage and documentation on how to use them)
• gathered input from the team to create guidelines that had sound reasoning behind them
I worked in cross-functional teams to help create DirectScale's new cloud-based direct selling platform.
It involved taking a holistic approach across multiple touchpoints and personas to ensure that direct-selling business (B2B) could give individual business owners (B2C) the tools they needed to be successful (E-commerce, single purchase & auto-ship)
Responsible for creating end-to-end experiences at all levels of fidelity including -
• dashboards and reports for individuals & teams
• training modules that tracked progress and gave insight into next-steps
• team management
• commissions tracking
Leveraged user-centered design to develop outcomes that are measurable and meaningful.
Communicated effectively through layers of hierarchy & bureaucracy.
Made E-5 (SSgt) my first time testing and got to experience Airman Leadership School. There were lots of activities performed with diverse groups of people in challenging situations.
After spending 6 years with little autonomy, I was excited to apply broad systems thinking to the 'real world'.
Writing
My first notes on how I was using DiffusionBee when it was first released in September 2022
Overview on the 4-step framework for reaching goals that have an uncertain path to them.
(kata = a routine you practice deliberately, so its pattern becomes a habit)
Creating a 💩junk-drawer page in Figma helped clear up a lot of confusion for what was super rough-explorations versus 'real designs'.
Education
full-time in-person coding bootcamp (MEAN stack)
before it got acquired, devmountain was a small school in Provo, UT.
the group project reinforced my interest in ux design & the larger product development process (from discovery to delivery).
3.9 (magna cum laude) / Lambda Pi Eta (communication honor society), Phi Kappa Phi honor society.
Participated as a key member in a Service Learning group, analyzed over 12,700 surveys in SPSS and produced recommendations for Idaho's Senior Health Insurance Benefits Advisors (SHIBA).
3.88 (magna cum laude) / Phi Theta Kappa honor society. Was thinking about going into a more I.T. Ops position before discovering ux design.
Completed the degree that you're automatically enrolled in when joining the Air Force (only ~25% of members finish). An example of finishing something, even though you have no desire to pursue it later.
Certifications
In order to be able to work on a computer in the Air Force, I needed to pass this test. Can confidently open up a desktop & jiggle the RAM to make sure it's fully seated. Also, there are 8 bits in a byte, and 4 bits is a nibble.