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Resume

I am a driven and versatile Design Leader, UX Researcher, and Product Designer in Washington, DC, with 16 years of professional experience at a variety of organizations. Currently, I am the UX and Product Design Team Manager at U.S. News & World Report where I lead the UX team toward better usability and scalability.

Relevant Skills

  • Design Management

  • A/B Testing

  • CSS

  • Design Systems

  • Design Ops

  • Figma

  • Heatmaps

  • Personas

  • Product Design

  • Research Ops

  • Sketch

  • User Testing

  • Wireframes

Professional Experience

Manager, Product and UX Design
U.S. News & World Report; Washington, DC

Sept 2023 – Current

  • Lead a team of 6 staff designers and 6 off-site contractors as the head of the UX Team.

  • Facilitate major product projects by reviewing designs and coaching designers on the cross-functional/hybrid UX team.

  • Partner directly with the Brand and Marketing team to refresh the U.S. News brand by designing major brand assets as well as providing documentation and training to support brand stewardship.

  • Own and maintain the design system in alignment with the brand aesthetics and UX best practices.

  • Manage redesign efforts by creating or delegating mocks, components, and documentation. Reduced design system to 1/3rd of its previous size.

  • Facilitate Usability Research by building training documentation, maintaining relationships with vendors, and reviewing test plans to democratize research efforts.

Senior User Experience Designer
U.S. News & World Report; Washington, DC

Jan 2016 – Sept 2023

  • Created UI elements, facilitated yearly launches, and was design stakeholder for multiple verticals.

  • Integral member of the design system team.

  • Led the design system migration to Figma.

  • Served as Research Operations lead; creating documentation of test results, training teams on best practices, and providing guidance for running research as well as managing and identifying new tools.

  • Managed several contract designers, delegating assignments, reviewing work for UX and U.S. News best-practices, and facilitating smooth interactions with product teams.

Manager, Digital Media Design
United Way Worldwide; Alexandria VA

Sept 2008 – Jan 2016

  • Served as point of contact for brand-related inquiries for the 120k employees of United Ways around the country.

  • Managed strategic relationships with major vendors, including Constant Contact and One Each.

  • Administered Brand Management site, which supplies local United Ways with localizable brand assets.

  • Oversaw front-end design updates of public website UnitedWay.org, internal network toolkits and products, external and partner sites, and provided leadership and expert opinion on all web-based products.

Education

UX Certificate – UX Research Specialty
Nielsen Norman Group
Credential ID: 1052782

2023

Certification – User Experience Design
General Assembly

2015

Bachelor of Science – Digital Media
Drexel University

2007

Recent Projects

Design System Reorg

Ongoing

  • Without dedicated resources, the U.S. News design system, Atlas, has grown too large, cumbersome, and outdated.

  • Led the effort to begin reorganizing the design system starting with a full audit of all existing design components to identify overlapping functionality.

  • Began redesigning new components to align with new branding direction and reorganized the libraries into functional groups.

  • Collaborated with the platform development team at all stages of the project, developing processes to better hand off component designs.

  • Itemized required components, creating design tickets to delegate continuing design work to my team.

  • Created documentation for design system rules around borders, spacing, typography, color, and variable usage.

U.S. News Homepage Aesthetic Refresh

Summer 2024

  • Collaborated with Brand and Marketing and Editorial leads to create wireframes aligned with new editorial strategy.

  • Managed review process for wireframes with major stakeholders, including executive leaders, SEO, Ads, and Business Intelligence.

  • Began iterating on wireframes by redesigning major components, using Material Design as the base level of most fundamental components.

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

  • This new homepage design will be the basis for a complete aesthetic redesign that overlaps with the design system reorganization.

Figma Migration

Summer 2023

  • Managed the process of scaling up our component pipeline and personally rebuilt and migrated main styles and 40 core components.

  • Built a centralized intranet section to save and share tutorials, tasks, and best practices for building components.

  • Created an onboarding presentation to train designers in using Figma and building components.

  • Developed a ticket template and managed individual tickets to delegate creating components to other designers.

 Research Operations

Ongoing

  • Created templates that combined all stages of brainstorming, iterating, launching, and documenting individual research projects.

  • Built four guides covering best practices, roles and responsibilities, and analysis steps for major research methods, which are available on our intranet.

  • Created and facilitated presentations for onboarding staff as well as for sharing test results with other teams or executives.

  • Manage the organization’s ongoing relationships with major research tool vendors and assist staff with troubleshooting.

Quizzard Recommendation Tool

Winter 2023

  • Identified optimal vendor by building a recommendation quiz concept test, then initiated communication with them to assess pricing and scalability.

  • Created wireframes and sample user flow to communicate approach.

  • Designed embed page for quiz as well as results and promos that can be embedded around the website to funnel users into the quiz.

  • Built initial tests with customized imagery and logic on vendor’s platform to guide product teams.

Performance Marketing Redesign

Winter 2023

  • Researched and redesigned all product review pages to be more scannable and better highlight key information for users.

  • Collaborated with development and product teams to streamline processes and cover edge cases in designs.

  • Initial tests of redesign saw a double digit increase in revenue.

Job Application

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