Summary

With over 10 years of experience in leading product design for SaaS platforms, I specialize in driving user-centered design strategies that align business objectives with customer needs. Expertise includes managing cross-functional teams and overseeing end-to-end product lifecycles for financial and enterprise-grade software. Leveraging research, design thinking, and data-driven insights, I deliver innovative solutions that drive user adoption and engagement.

Farmers Insurance Group– Product Design Team Lead
07/21—Present

Lead Product Designer and People Leader for Farmers' enterprise digital products, focusing on consumer and agent-facing self-service portals.

  • SaaS Integration & Product Evolution: Partnered with product owners to seamlessly integrate MetLife policies into Farmers’ digital ecosystem, creating an efficient and scalable MVP to enhance policyholder workflows.

  • User One-Time Payment (UOTP) Portal: Designed a streamlined payment portal, reducing call volume, boosting rNPS, and driving CSS account creation with a 59.7 customer satisfaction score.

  • Hybrid eSign Solution: Redesigning the policy contingency signing experience to boost completion rates by 10%. Applied usability testing and root cause analysis to resolve friction and streamline user flow.

  • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Led workshops with product managers, development partners, and business stakeholders to align design strategies with business goals and customer needs.

  • Advocacy for Human-Centered Design: Championed design thinking and UX methodologies, fostering collaboration across teams and raising organizational design maturity.

  • People Leadership: Foster team growth through one-on-ones, design reviews, and goal-setting, collaborating with leadership on performance evaluations.

Cast & Crew Entertainment | Lead UX/UI Design Manager
05/20—07/21

UX department manager for Cast and Crew suite of payroll and financial SaaS products for the entertainment industry.

  • SaaS Platform Enhancements: Defined the UX strategy for payroll and financial SaaS platforms, creating user flows, wireframes, and intuitive design solutions to optimize onboarding, timekeeping, and financial workflows.

  • Design Process Implementation: Established a scalable UX/UI process, ensuring consistent delivery of design assets and prototypes across teams.

  • User Adoption Metrics: Improved adoption rates through usability testing, survey analysis, and leveraging analytics tools like Pendo.

  • Persona Development: Facilitated persona workshops to align product features with diverse user roles and permissions.

M&C Saatchi Worldwide | Senior UX Designer
08/18—Present (Contract)

Involved in the full product lifecycle and discovery for the redesign and strategic thinking for Herbalife.com. My role and responsibilities include working with other agency partners and cross-functional teams within Herbalife.

  • End-to-End Product Lifecycle Ownership: Played a key role in the redesign of Herbalife.com, contributing to strategy, discovery, and delivery phases while collaborating with cross-functional teams and agency partners.

  • Stakeholder Engagement & Research: Conducted in-depth stakeholder interviews with C-suite executives, distributors, and customers to identify key pain points and opportunities for improvement in the digital experience.

  • Human-Centered Design Leadership: Synthesized research findings into actionable problem statements and themes, ensuring a user-centered approach to feature prioritization and experience design.

  • Information Architecture & Ecosystem Design: Mapped complex parent-child relationships to create an improved information architecture sitemap, supporting a scalable and intuitive navigation structure.

  • Collaborative Workshops: Facilitated workshops to align stakeholders on the effort/reward value of features, epics, and stories, driving clarity in project prioritization.

  • Journey Mapping & Prototyping: Designed high-level user flows to visualize a new digital ecosystem and created mobile wireframes that captured user journeys across shopping funnels and repeat-order value streams.

  • Strategic Mobile Experience Design: Enhanced mobile experiences by integrating value streams and social media entry points, improving customer engagement and retention.

MXM (Part of Accenture Interactive)  | UX Lead
01/18—07/18 (Contract)

Collaborated with product managers, developers, and business teams to design new and innovative products that include enterprise and B2C solutions on the Johnson Johnson's Acuvue and Allergan accounts.

Edmunds.com | UX LEAD
10/16—12/17
 

Shaped the direction of Edmunds' B2C products, including the Car Buying Platform and Member Services, by leading product initiatives and collaborating with cross-functional teams in a fast-paced Agile environment. Recognized with a merit increase for high performance.

  • SaaS Car Buying Solutions: Designed and iterated on a car-buying SaaS platform, including developing wireframes and prototypes informed by user research and journey mapping.

  • Boosted customer return rate: on the Edmunds membership platform by 60%, up from 17% in the previous version, driving 23k users to return twice a month and generating higher-quality leads.

  • Metrics-Driven Design: Conducted A/B testing and card sorting exercises to optimize the car comparison tool, resulting in increased user engagement and decision-making efficiency.

  • R&D Innovation: Contributed to experimental projects within an R&D team focused on creating a seamless online car-buying experience.

  • Cross-Functional Leadership: Collaborated closely with product managers and research teams in an Agile environment to deliver high-fidelity designs.

Hoverstate | Sr. UX Designer
11/15—10/16

Hoverstate is a digital agency specializing in creating innovative solutions in technology for the health and wellness industry. I work closely with the creative department and other stakeholders to establish a strategic user flow for new product development on the UnitedHealthcare small business health insurance website.

  • SaaS for Health Insurance: Designed user flows and interaction models for UnitedHealthcare's small business health insurance website, aligning workflows with business requirements.

  • Usability Testing Leadership: Conducted remote user testing, uncovering pain points that informed iterative product improvements and reduced friction in the purchasing funnel.

  • Process Optimization: Shortened the development lifecycle by implementing data-driven design decisions, reducing costs by $60,000 on key projects. Used Unbounce to deliver and optimize landing page performance for better conversion.

MobileCause | Lead UX/UI Designer

12/14 – 07-15 (Contract)

My role as the Lead UX UI designer is to improve the existing user flow for a cloud-based SAAS solution to help non-profit organizations gain new donors, increase recurring gifts and engage supporters.

  • SaaS Platform Optimization: Redesigned user flows and improved the information architecture (IA) for a cloud-based fundraising SaaS platform, enabling non-profit organizations to increase donor engagement and recurring contributions.

  • User-Centered Design Success: Enhanced the donation form setup page using a streamlined accordion view, resulting in a 90% positive user feedback rate and increased form completion efficiency.

  • Strategic Product Development: Led design-first strategic planning for new product initiatives and iterative refinements, aligning with business goals and customer feedback to deliver high-impact solutions.

  • Collaborative Delivery: Partnered with cross-functional teams to document and implement hundreds of UI/UX improvements in JIRA, ensuring seamless development handoff and live production releases.

  • Mobile Application Design: Designed and launched a MobileCause point-of-sale iOS and Android app from inception to release, generating over $400,000 in contributions and demonstrating measurable business impact.

Sonic Electronix.com | Sr. UX/UI Designer / Creative Manager
05/13-10/14

As the Sr. UX designer my role was to lead, research and complete minimum viable user centric design initiatives for Sonic Electronix business objectives and its customers. This resulted in a frictionless user experience to purchase a car and home audio products online.

  • SaaS Product Optimization: Led user-centered design initiatives to create a seamless online experience for purchasing car and home audio products, focusing on improving usability and conversion rates for Sonic Electronix’s e-commerce platform.

  • Data-Driven Design Impact: Simplified the return policy process, increasing conversion rates from 8% to 9% on key interactions. Improved the purchasing funnel conversion rate to 0.88%, driving a 12.8% year-over-year revenue increase.

  • User Research & Testing: Spearheaded usability studies and on-site interviews, uncovering actionable insights that reduced page abandonment and enhanced the customer journey.

  • Prototyping & Design Execution: Produced wireframes, mockups, and high-fidelity prototypes using Axure and Balsamiq to deliver scalable design solutions aligned with technical and business goals.

  • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partnered with marketing, development, and product teams to ensure consistent and effective design implementation across all digital channels.

  • Mentorship & Design Leadership: Mentored creative team members, ensuring adherence to design best practices and quality standards across affiliate marketing, email campaigns, social media, and web assets.

Ballistic Designs,inc. | Owner / UX/UI designer
06/03-05/13

Owned and operated my own creative studio for ten years producing unique branding and custom web solutions for clients in the health insurance, automotive and technology industries.

  • SaaS & Custom Solutions Development: Founded and operated a creative studio specializing in delivering branding and custom web solutions for clients in the health insurance, automotive, and technology sectors.

  • Data-Driven Results: Increased online sales for Piloti.com by 400% in one year through improved website functionality, user-centric design enhancements, and integrated branding strategies.

  • End-to-End Product Design: Gathered requirements from stakeholders, developed sitemaps and UML diagrams to map user flows, and delivered high-fidelity prototypes and wireframes using Axure to guide development.

  • Cross-Functional Team Leadership: Supervised and collaborated with a diverse freelance team of programmers, designers, and copywriters, ensuring seamless execution of design and development milestones.

  • Strategic Collaboration: Partnered with marketing directors and product managers to develop cohesive, multi-channel campaigns with consistent branding and messaging.

  • Project Management & Delivery: Used Basecamp to oversee project lifecycles, ensuring on-time delivery of solutions that met client and business needs.

  • Stakeholder Engagement: Acted as a liaison between clients and development teams, ensuring functional documentation and requirements aligned with project goals and user needs.

Achievement:
Launched my own online golf reservations system called “Level2-Golf” for public and private golf courses.

Freelance | Art Director

  • The Walt Disney Corporation

  • 360 Designs

  • Direct TV

  • The Dupuis Group

  • The Identity Group

Tools of the Trade

  • Invision

  • Sketch

  • Axure 8.0

  • Balsamiq Mockups,

  • Adobe Photoshop CC

  • Adobe Dreamweaver CC

  • Adobe Illustrator CC

  • Optimizely

  • Unbounced

  • Microsoft Office

  • Google Docs

  • Browser Developer Tools

  • MySql Workbench

  • Sublime Text

  • Coda

  • WordPress

  • Megento

Summary of Skills

  • User Experience Design (UX)

  • User Interface Design (UI)

  • Interaction Design

  • HCI (Human Computer Interaction)

  • Usability Testing

  • User Research

  • Web Project Management

  • Product QA

  • Product Manager

  • Wireframes

  • Rapid Prototyping

  • User Centered Design Best Practices

  • Hierarchical Task Analysis, Information Architect

  • Entity Relationship Diagramming

  • Google Analytics

  • HTML/CSS coding and browser editing

  • JQuery libraries (fundamental understanding)

  • Bootstrap (fundamental understanding),

  • Creative Direction

  • Design Mentoring

  • Email Campaigns

  • Copywriting/Message Development

  • Conceptual Thinker

Education

Capella University

B.S. in IT Technology (Systems Development for Mobile Technology)
Graduated with honors | GPA: 3.76

UCLA, University Extension

Certification in Graphic Design & Computer Graphics