Falling in love with the problem since 2003.
I was first an art director/designer in university around 2003 then an UX designer since 2009. When I'm not designing, I enjoy fútbol, native plant gardening, church activities, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, my hometown Dallas Mavericks, my beloved University of Texas at Austin Longhorns and raising a family in beautiful Seattle area. I enjoy cross-functional collaboration to first understand the problem then design solutions so users can do their jobs better.
Throughout my career, I have learned from others to develop three key guiding principles to make great SaaS products.
My Guiding principles
PUSH RELEVANT INFORMATION
DEVELOP EMPATHY
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Design to make their jobs easier.
Listening to and understanding end users is crucial.
Deliver measurable business goals and actionable insights to get user satisfaction.
My work experience
Seattle, WA — 2 year 11 mos - present
UX Interaction Design Lead at Google
I work on GenAI, AI, ML and related projects.
Projects
∙ Health AI
∙ Conversational Interfaces
∙ AI Agents
∙ Gemini Cloud Assist
∙ Future vision work
∙ Native Mobile apps
∙ Recommenders
∙ Dashboards
∙ Notebooks
20% projects
∙ Google for Healthcare
∙ Google Workspace
∙ Google Maps Developer
Shipped Features
Google I/O ‘24: Introducing Gemini model capabilities for Places API
Build limitless workloads on BigQuery: New features beyond SQL
Introducing partitioning and clustering recommendations for optimizing BigQuery usage
Monitor health, resource utilization, and jobs
View edition slot recommendations
New BigQuery editions: flexibility and predictability for your data cloud
View project level administrative charts data
Seattle, WA — 1 yr 5 mos
Senior UX Designer, AI + Data at F5
F5 powers 7% of the world's internet traffic, 450 million websites, has 6300+ employees in 43 countries and 20,000 customers. Products include automation, security, performance, and insights that empower customers to create, secure, and operate adaptive applications that increase revenue, reduce costs, improve operations, and better protect users.
I lead the UX and product design for a new SaaS product called Beacon in the APM and AIOps space. I collaborate with 35+ teammates (data scientists, engineers, and PMs) in the AI and Data product group and 16+ developers and 4 PMs in my direct product team.
- Establish new UX culture, processes and UX research
- Culture: design reviews, design check-ins, how to follow a design system, developer-designer handoffs
- UX Metrics: user hypotheses, evaluating design confidence, pre and post launch usability testing, USE (Usefulness, Satisfaction, and Ease of use)
- UX Research: heuristic analysis, prioritization matrix, user interviews, user journey mapping workshops, tree testing and card sorting
- Understanding market fit and business goals
- Negotiated 25% savings in a new UX Research tool for company use
- Resolve tech and design debt
Shipped Features
Bellevue, WA — 10 mos
Senior UX Designer, Dynamics 365 at Microsoft (Contractor)
Microsoft has had 80+ B&M stores and the online store supports 200+ languages and global markets. I worked on Dynamics 365 Commerce and Microsoft Store in a design studio of 550 designers. As the lead designer, I do usability testing, review voice of customer data, product and interaction design, create clarity, task flows, wireframes and journey mapping for overall cart and checkout flows and integrations
- I redesign checkout and purchase flows for a North Star vision including responsive mobile views following several design systems
- Help with brick & mortar stores in addition to digital store
- Collaborate with 20+ developers and 6+ PMs across 6 teams and 4 departments including Legal, Retail Stores, Xbox, Product, Marketing and others.
- Worked with 28 teams to launch XBox All-Access
Shipped Products
XBox All-Access
Bellevue, WA (Remote) — 2 yrs 11 mos
UX Design Career Track Mentor at Springboard (Part-time)
- I review mentee project submissions, including a final capstone project and how to create a portfolio,
- I provide guidance and answering questions about UX topics covered in the curriculum
- I approve course completion for each mentee
- I provide students constructive feedback to ultimately help them become successful UX Researchers, UX Designers or Product Designers.
Graduated Students
3 (Product Designer, two UX Researchers)
Houston, TX (Remote) — 3 yrs 2 mos
UX Designer and Research Lead at ServiceNow
#1 on Forbes The World's Most Innovative Companies List for 2018. I worked in three UX teams with different goals.
- As part of Inspire Team in solution consulting (pre-sales) I worked with UX designers, researchers, software engineers, software architects, business value analysts and other teammates.
- I led discovery (workshops, interviews) and design (product, wireframes, prototypes) at the top 1 % of largest 2000 global companies.
- I led discovery (workshops, interviews) and design (product, wireframes, prototypes) at the top 1 % of largest 2000 global companies.
- In the product design team, I worked on ITSM (IT Service Management) Service Catalog, Guided Tour Designer, ITOM (IT Operations Managment) Discovery, Operational Intelligence, Orchestration, Service Mapping and Cloud Management.
- I also led conversational design for B2B virtual agent (chatbot) for ITSM, HR and Customer Service.
- In the digital marketing team, I led design efforts for a B2C chatbot.
- Flew 40+ times and worked with 30+ customers in 4 countries.
Shipped Products and Apps
Virtual Agent
Inspire Portal
Outage Management
Cloud Sprawl Dashboard
Employee Relocation
Solution Consulting Onboarding
Houston, TX (Remote) — 2 yrs 3 mos
UI/UX Software Engineer (Lead Designer and Team Lead) at SkyNet Satellite Communications
As a UX Team of One for an Australian HQ company, I led a redesign of the Reach SaaS platform (desktop, responsive web and android) used for tracking commercial airplanes, trucking operators, ferries and personnel.
- I led end to end design
- Conducted UX Research
- Did some front end development and unit testing
- Managed JIRA Kanban boards (de facto scrum master and did agile estimation with story points), helped with cherry picking and code conflicts in git
- Collaborated with customer success, sales and reported to C-level management.
- Flew 2 times to Australia and worked with 4 airlines with 5K passengers total, 1 trucking company with 150 trucks, 3 government agencies and field command center operators.
Shipped Products
Reach Aero (Web)
Reach Duress (Android)
Reach HUD (Android)
Dallas, TX — 1 yr 3 mos
Front End Developer at ClubCorp
- I designed and developed customer facing websites and apps for 200+ country clubs, city clubs, athletic clubs and stadium clubs nationwide.
- I designed and developed 20+ websites using their enterprise CMS
- Helped on an interactive touch screen UI for lobbies for club members and corporate sponsors
Keller, TX — 2 yrs 9 mos
Web and Graphic Designer at Northwood Church
As the only designer on staff at a 12 pastor church with $2M annual budget, I designed everything.
I designed websites, presentations, posters, billboards and print magazines
Established an identity system including interior signage
Taught departmental secretaries how to use Adobe Indesign to improve weekly processes
Remote — 13 years
UX Consultant at Freelance
I lead strategy and design efforts (concept to final product) for seed to early stage startups, non-profits and churches depending on their crucial organizational needs.
7 mos
UX Designer at Blinds.com (Home Depot)
Design and test PDP (product description pages) and Support pages for conversion rates.
6 mos
UX Designer at Theatrics.com
Prototype, design and develop a social video platform for mobile and desktop. This media and entertainment startup was focused on a third screen experience before funding ran out.
2 mos
Software Engineer (Lead UI Designer) at Rockwell Collins (Contractor)
Design a web app for live combat use. No further information can be disclosed.
My Client Experience
Enterprise
Allianz Life Insurance, Arrow Electronics, Babcock Intl., Bridgestone Tires, Bristow Helicopters, DuPont, Merck KGaA, Credit Suisse, Koch, MetLife Insurance, Rockwell Collins, Honeywell, Nationwide Insurance, Red Hat, SC Johnson, Swiss Re, Target, Telstra, Tieto Oyj
Small to medium sized businesses
Rocky's Own Transport, Hevilift Pty Ltd, PNG Airlines, North Dallas Eye Associates
Startups
Theatrics, Blinds.com (acquired by Home Depot), MyVaxines, Tree Frog Mail
Non-profits and Government
OhioHealth, Carnegie Mellon University, Queensland Govt. - Dept of Communities, Disability Services and Seniors and Translink, The Grain Project, Local Motion, West Houston Chinese Church, Asian American Baptist Church, Arlington Chinese Church
Recommended Books
The Cathedral Within: Transforming Your Life by Giving Something Back by Bill Shore
The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper
Artificial Intelligence Driven Design by Joël van Bodegraven