About me
The work you’ll read about here represents a small slice of what I’ve done in my career. This will tell you who I am and what I do for organizations.
Value Creation
I create external value through
launching and evolving successful digital experiences and products
continual focus “outside the walls” to ensure what I work on meets real needs
developing and using a high level of contextual business and market acumen
experience with comparable sectors and verticals to inform new work
critical thought and analysis about what will truly solve a problem, improve a product or establish a viable new service
I create internal value through
creating effective artifacts and doing the storytelling needed to provide clarity, meaning and direction
facilitating structured and creative conversations that move teams forward
collaborating, cooperating and negotiating effectively with my first-team partners
building a strong internal network through delivering on my commitments
delivering experiences that internal teams can successfully support and manage
supporting less senior designers in their quest to grow in their careers
My Core Skills
Generalist: I explore new topics and disciplines so that I grow as a human. Adding new skills keeps my ‘toolbox’ growing and evolving.
Research: I like messy problems that need true mixed methods. I am equally good at staring down big data sets and testing incremental improvements made in rounds of prototyping. I am talented and practiced at non-linear analysis of disparate and/or interconnected data.
Innovation: My favorite moment of anything I’m working on is when I hit the aha! moments. I treat innovation as a synthesis-driven, creative and interpretive practice I can use to turn what I learn into useful, viable ideas, strategies and options.
Design -- the discipline I use most often to bring my work to life. I use visual, communications, user experience, service and content design. I regularly work with design systems and have led the creation and implementation of two of them.
Experience
My past experience includes 23 years of doing, teaching and leading in most facets of design for technology:
Service design
Customer experience design
Strategy and delivering on it
Expert facilitation design and execution
User experience
User interface design
Content and information design
Information architecture
Mixed method research
Ethnography
Content strategy and UX writing.
Values
Learning: I am at my best when I am learning about something — new, hard, ambiguous and complex are my favorite.
Fun: I think Ben & Jerry are right. If it’s not fun, why do it? It keeps me going, especially when I hit blocks, and helps me not take myself too seriously.
Adventure: Adventure helps me stay both an active learner and a generalist. I am at my best when I can cast a wide net and see what new things I catch.
Honesty: Life is short. I don’t waste time hiding what I really feel or think, with kindness and compassion inextricably built in.
Creativity: I believe creativity is at the heart of all successful human endeavor — a fundamental force, like gravity. I am at my best when I’m digging deep into that primal space — if I can see the glimmer and feel how my idea will work, but have to work to find language to describe it. I know that sounds pretty esoteric and possibly woo-woo, but hey, honesty is another one of my values.
