JOSHUA LANDIS

Led a team of 5 staff designers and 6 off-site contractors acting as the head of the UX Team as well as setting direction for UX for the organization.  Guided cross-functional team on product strategy and on triaging major product projects, communicating with product teams on major goals and coaching designers to best meet those goals, managing design resources when needed based on organization priorities.  

• Owned and executed major overhaul of design system in alignment with the brand aesthetics and UX best practices, making it simpler and easier to understand, with fewer sources of development debt.  

  • Conducted full audit of 300+ design components to identify overlapping functionality and eliminate redundancy. 

  • Collaborated with platform development team at all stages of the project, identifying Material UI as a basis for the refresh from a pool of 5 other design systems and system frameworks. 

  • Created library of design tokens to align design with engineering. Reorganized components into 7 functional groups aligned with Material UI's organization. 

  • Delegated 40 customized component work tickets to the design team, training them in best practices and in Figma. 

  • Documented design system rules available within the centralized Confluence intranet as guidance for borders, spacing, typography, color, and design tokens for use by designers and engineers.  

• Drove efficiencies in the design system, reducing it by two-thirds while ensuring full functional performance.  

  • Identified opportunities to improve scalability, in collaboration with platform engineers. 

  • Improved naming conventions and navigation in the system, eliminating the need to create new elements.  

• Collaborated with the Brand and Marketing team leader to refresh the U.S. News brand by designing major brand assets, such as a batch of 10 email templates.  Executed major update of the brand guidelines. 

  • Pitched building brand guidelines as the U.S. News had not had comprehensive guidelines in some time. Having a brand reference document would allow teams within the organization to better align with brand messaging and aesthetics. 

  • Initiated cross-functional collaboration with major stakeholders, including Photo Editors and Lifecycle Team members, to define and guide certain important branding principles and applications.  

  • Worked with a staff designer to create guideline outline and edited final copy. 

  • Designed print lay out for final 40 page shareable Brand Guideline artifact along with visual aids. 

• Overhauled site Homepage, a major hub with millions of unique users a year. 

  • Managed review process for wireframes with major stakeholders, including executive leaders, SEO, Ads, and Business Intelligence to acquire consensus in one month. 

  • Began iterating on wireframes by redesigning around 20 major components, using Material UI as the base level of most fundamental components. These components were intended to be modular and reorderable to allow flexibility around the news cycle. 

  • Handed off final design after more stakeholder reviews, creating documentation for new component behavior and running QA with three engineers during the development process. 

  • Heatmaps and Google Analytics conducted after launch revealed an increase in key engagement metrics such as time on page. 

• Facilitated Usability Research by building training documentation for research methods, like user testing and interviews. 

• Conducted skills assessment on individual team members. Provided mentorship as needed.