VISION
What does the future look like? Let’s find out together.
For 2024-2025 I'm working inside the enterprise to bring the clean energy future one step closer; aligning with their north star, developing cross-functional plans, and designing to solve people and business problems. My focus remains on desirability, viability, and feasibility.
I leverage a will be centered around:
- Research: Perform and work closely with research to deliver qual and quant insights
- Desirability: Rapid prototyping to quickly understand desirability and whether solutions will solve customer’s problems
- Viability: measuring impact to the business over time
- Feasibility: exploring and isolating ideal solutions
- Teams: continuing to find and foster the growth of talented, compassionate, intelligent people in a positive culture of clarity, learning, empowerment and flow
- evangelizing an intellectual basis for design discussions, practices, a shared language of design thinking, and innovation with executive, product, engineering, research and other groups
- creating feedback-rich, emotionally engaging software experiences that provide self-endorsed, intrinsic value to users
VISION
My career vision is to evolve as a UX leader and designer; helping cross-functional teams create authentic, engaging experiences that deliver clear value, resulting in stronger trust between brand and users.
Focusing on:
- crafting a north star, vision and roadmaps that align up and across the organization, and within the UX teams, for a SaaS, ecommerce or related company
- translating insights into design opportunities to create concise strategies and design executions against business objectives and users' needs
- continuing to find and foster the growth of talented, compassionate, intelligent people in a positive culture of clarity, learning, empowerment and flow
- evangelizing an intellectual basis for design discussions, practices, a shared language of design thinking, and innovation with executive, product, engineering, research and other groups
- evolving UX practices in an Agile cross-functional organization
- measuring our work so we can feel accomplishment and grow
- creating feedback-rich, emotionally engaging software experiences that provide self-endorsed, intrinsic value to users
TRUST
I’ve supported enterprise brands, organizations, and built agencies for over 20 years; both as a principal and leader.
career
Getting Here
Digital was new. I began my career helping create CNN.com. I ventured out forming a digital agency in Chicago, grew it profitably to 130 by working with brilliant pioneers in user experience (Nielsen/Norman) and building software for innovative brands. Foundational lessons in managing people, the complexities of design and technology projects, how to run a rapidly growing business, and the cultural challenges of merging into a larger concern.
Next chapter. Founded a new digital agency focused on global travel & leisure, retail, and startups. Along the way I invented and sold software to Adobe (what a ride that was), which led to being sought after for pushing the boundaries of UX atop the Adobe Experience stack for global personalization in web, app, and marketing. The team grew its design, software and marketing chops and eventually merged with an enterprise software company to build experiences at vast scale.
Intrinsic over extrinsic. Seeking evolution I found Carnevale, a future experiences agency of incredible talent, compassion, and wild imagination. I dove deep into behavior change design and realized I need to solve people's most persistent, pervasive challenges through clean energy in a cross-functional corporate environment. I am Principal Experience Design for Pilots and Strategic Partnerships at Consumers Energy where I have the autonomy work with any group and strategically lean in; robust research and UX design, complex IT, business and customer impact evaluation, infrastructure, legal, whatever it takes to deliver energy efficiency, resiliency, and load growth that impacts millions of people every day.
experience
Portfolio
Adobe BrowserLab
A need turns into an invention and SaaS product to help millions.
ux principles
Building trust between people and brands through experiences is challenging. I work with teams to solve this.
I work closely within organizations to establish a clear vision, create and lead teams, and ultimately deliver software that is valuable to users. This statement sounds simple enough, but it requires creating experiences that engage users in authentic ways, helping them see progress towards their self-endorsed goals to better envision who they can be.
In addition to 20 years of running software companies and directing design teams, I’ve refined user-centered design practices to go beyond utility, task-focused software by focusing on human behavior and business results.
Designing for Trust in Software
I strengthen the relationship between people and brands through better software engagement
Can we offer users more than usability and task efficiency?
UX principles
Is task-focused UX Design the best way?
The bulk of BtoB and BtoC software are task-focused utility experiences. The software meets business and users’ needs via established mental models, ux design patterns and performance metrics. This is good.
There is an opportunity to engage users more deeply.
I believe the future of UX design includes leveraging behavioral and game design to create feedback-rich, emotionally engaging experiences that flourish where users are most receptive.
The Evolution of UX Design is Authentic Engagement
What is Authentic Engagement?
- reflects progress towards self-endorsed goals
- feedback-rich where people are receptive
- focused on users’ values and goals
- relevant and clearly valuable
- humane; intrinsic over extrinsic values
I believe authentic engagement is achieved through a deeper understanding of people’s behaviors, motivations and abilities.
Engagement is most effective when users have autonomy, competence and relatedness.
Better engagement leads to better outcomes and trust.
ux principles
Designing for Consensus
Great design can bring clarity and consensus within an organization. I encourage a transparent process that iteratively produces increasingly detailed, visual assets to bring stakeholders together to solve a common challenge.
Value is especially created and demonstrable when a product is well designed, people are properly trained, and the UX process is easy to understand and utilize. Ultimately, diverse organizational groups like product, technology, design, marketing, support and executives can more easily speak the same language, stay informed, and get behind one vision.
Concise design artifacts can be shared up, down, across, and between organizations to build consensus
When you don't design for Consensus, change gets expensive
The 1 : 10 : 100 Rule
For every $1 to fix a problem during Research and Design, it would cost $10 to fix the same problem in Development, and would cost $100 to fix the same problem after the product’s release. Source: Forrester
Ideas, opinions and articles
Onward and Upward
Consulting and Advising
It’s safe to say I’m accustomed to working and supporting cross-functional teams creating software across all stages of product development, business strategy, and design. If you’re working on a problem related to improving user experiences for complex business and consumer software through deeper engagement there’s a good chance
I could be of help.
I limit my consulting, advisory and tactical work to a select group of companies and individuals each year. If you'd like to discuss possibilities, please
reach out.
Let’s make experiences better, together.
