Resume

As a senior leader within the Digital Experience Transformation group at Unum, I am heading up the UX research and design strategy for our holistic consumer member experience, including management of claims and employee leaves.

I am also helping my Digital Experience team build mature, consistent user-centered design processes, methodologies, and assets, including a customized software tool set, a longitudinal user research insights knowledge base, design systems, prototyping widget libraries, and various reusable templates.

Experience Dynamics is an award-winning User Experience consulting firm that uses real-world research to help Fortune 500 clients engage, improve and innovate UX designs for digital experiences. We help marketers, product managers and technologists achieve higher levels of user engagement, efficiency and conversion.

I worked side-by-side with Experience Dynamic's founders, leading UX design, usability testing, and contextual field studies for numerous clients across a diverse range of industries. I also conducted UX certification and other training workshops.

Presence PBC was a digital wellness startup whose mission was to make the UX of the World Wide Web and social media more efficient, intentional, and health-centric. We aspired to build a paradigm-shifting info gathering tool that empowers users to take control of their own digital experience, thus requiring a massive upgrade to the fundamentally outdated UX that has been available to all of us since the first web browser emerged almost 3 decades ago. Rather than browse and consume endless feeds of irrelevant content, manually scanning for what you care about most, Presence would offer the opportunity to privately and securely engage with info on your terms by proactively curating just-in-time content and automating routine tasks. In other words, a web that works for you, providing only what you need, when you need it. To achieve this, Presence would strategically leverage an encrypted, decentralized Personal AI engine, powered by constant analysis of real-time conversation and activity. We called it "big data of one."

As a Co-Founder, I recruited a dynamic team of 10+ volunteers to help develop the product concept, marketing, brand, and investor pitch, culminating in media appearances and a presentation at one of the largest blockchain conferences in the world.

As CXO, my primary role was to champion empathy and contextual awareness in design, as well as lead the construction of a cohesive, best-in-class User Experience for Presence's users and partners. It was critical to our mission at Presence that we elevate the field of UX by incorporating Digital Wellness as a third pillar, alongside Usability and Desirability. This means that everything we built into our products and services needed to be centrally focused on maximizing utility, efficiency, purpose, meaningful social engagement, and a sense of calm, satisfying delight. Meanwhile, it must minimize overwhelm, distraction, and harmfully addicting interactions that lead to digital domination over one's life.

Toast is an all-in-one point of sale and restaurant management system. Built specifically for restaurants on an affordable cloud-based platform, Toast offers advanced functionality including tableside ordering, quick menu modifications, real-time enterprise reporting, online ordering, and labor management on an easy-to-use interface. Toast’s full-featured POS platform is used nationwide by restaurants, cafes, nightclubs, and enterprise franchises.

I oversaw Toast's User Experience department, including UX Architects, Product Designers, Researchers, and Visual Designers. I built this Digital Experience program, quadrupling our team's size in less than 9 months, by rapidly recruiting and developing UI interactive design, user research, and visual design talent.

KEY ACHIEVEMENTS

• Produced a roadmap for end-to-end user experience across the entire Toast suite of products, including activation, onboarding, and the entire user journey.
• Strategically built a comprehensive, mature usability program, implementing a user-centered design process that integrates user research and validation activities into all product management and development projects.
• Tactically provided expertise and recommendations, based on continuously collected user data and feedback, in the form of personas, wireframes, interactive prototypes, and various user research summary reports.
• Designed specialized tools, deliverables, metrics, and usability training programs.
• Organized and led multiple hackathon project teams, envisioning a revamped, streamlined ordering screen for servers and overhauling the information architecture of the customer-facing backend administrative configuration for Toast's POS system.

* NaviNet was acquired by NantHealth at the beginning of 2016. I came over to NantHealth through this acquisition, retaining my same leadership role.

Built NantHealth's User Experience department from the ground up, overseeing a high-performing team of UX Architects, UX Designers, and Visual Designers.

My team and I ran a usability program that extended across the entire company. I strategically designed and implemented a UCD process, integrating user research and validation activities into all product development projects, including customized delivery solutions. This included coming up with specialized tools, deliverables, metrics, and usability training programs.

We also tactically provided expertise and recommendations, based on continuous user data, in the form of personas, wireframes, interactive prototypes, and various research summary reports.

Worked as a senior consultant inside IBM's iX UX design consultancy for digital transformation, where we provided customer experience optimization services to various Fortune 500 and public sector clients across multiple industries.

While at IBM, I also graduated from their 12-month-long intensive Leadership Excellence Program.

As a Usability Engineer within the Storage Systems division of IBM, I facilitated customer studies and authored UX specifications for mid-range and enterprise-level storage device management interfaces, while also successfully filing several patents.

KEY ACHIEVEMENTS & ROLES

• I participated in multi-site strategy sessions and workgroups to develop a unified style guide and set of widgets for all IBM storage interfaces.
• I acted as the Storage Systems representative on the ID/UX Council to improve and standardize the iterative UCD design process across all of IBM.
• I developed a web application that combines contextual collaboration and tracking tools with interactive prototypes and detailed specifications to produce a unified, richly interactive environment for managing usability deliverables.

Provided usability consulting services such as training workshops, heuristic evaluations, full-scale usability testing, and field studies to a diverse set of clients, including Microsoft, Intel, Key Bank, Oregon Health & Sciences University, Whitepages and Rentvillas.

KEY ACHIEVEMENTS

• Conducted a web navigation usability study of 100 websites to identify and determine best practices in navigation usability.
• Co-wrote a published paper on the temporal aspects of tasks and authored product reviews for Newsfactor.com.

Working within Qualcomm's Intellectual Property department, I led a large-scale project to design and implement a web-based document management system for the company’s vast number of patent files.

I produced a business solution for organizing and standardizing all the department's electronic documents, while designing the UX and authoring the user manual. As part of this business solution, I developed a unique, homegrown web application for initiation and registration of new patent applications.

Collaborating with a lead faculty member of the Interactive Collaborative Technologies (ICT) research group within the School of Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine, I conducted field studies involving the use of mobile electronic devices by work crews tasked with setting up major public events.

Collaborated with UC Irvine and MCC’s web development team to produce a plan that would efficiently extend clinically-based screening tests to a broader online audience.

I conducted analyses of the overall market, target audience, competitors, while also identifying usability issues relating to the website and newsletter. I then designed, implemented, and analyzed online surveys, providing strategic recommendations based on the results.

My focus in this graduate degree program was on digital wellness in social media, Internet, and device usage.

I researched the impacts of various types of media on individuals, groups, and cultures. I also studied how to most effectively use media in order to inform, influence, educate, and mobilize people to help generate positive social change.

As a student, I was a member of the Interactive and Collaborative Technology group, concentrating on topics such as computer-mediated communication, the sociology of information, organizational impacts of technology, mobile computing, and effective ethnography techniques.

I also took additional courses in business consulting and internet marketing.

ACTIVITIES & SOCIETIES

• Orange County Computer Human Interaction Special Interest Group (OCCHI)
• Intramural Basketball League (won championship)

My undergraduate focus was on cognitive science, human memory processes, and cooperative tasks.

While at UW, I participated in extensive research involving memory and human information processing, assisting with experimental design, subject recruitment, trial facilitation, and analysis.

ACTIVITIES & SOCIETIES

• Dean's List
• Multiple honors societies
• Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity