The biggest challenge with traditional companies is getting them to haul ass off the end of the pier and cannonball into the culture of user centered design.

Half measures are wasted measures. Adopting user centered design is often painful, but like any exercise there's a lot you can do to minimize soreness and still see the benefits. 

By conducting early workshops, stakeholder, and user interviews, and even building scrappy prototypes, we were able to quickly demonstrate during our first sprint how the design thinking process can yield valuable insights. 

Immersion in their business helped us craft a service design strategy and get that critical early buy-in and demonstrate our user centered approach as viable throughout the rest of the engagement.

Of critical importance, and what's often overlooked, is that none of the aforementioned best practices are possible when hobbled with traditional agency T&M contracts. Creating an environment of experimentation simply isn't possible when you're change ordering yourself and more importantly your project into an early grave. 

Beware any design "visionary" who doesn't understand that the Business of Design is just as important as knowing how to facilitate stakeholder workshops and wax poetic about "big D design".

Usability Testing

My work, and my team's work, endured over 500 hours of usability testing, and motivated C and V level stakeholders to integrate testing into every future product.

The vast majority of design leads aren't gutsy enough to risk their work being criticized and rely heavily on their own "influencer" smoke blowing, or worse, round after round of feedback from stakeholders who 99% of the time aren't the target user and understand things anecdotally at best.

Features

I solved real problems affecting people at every socioeconomic level, not just #firstworldproblems for tech lazyboys. 

I don't mess with vanity projects and I'm here to build capable teams ready to solve real world problems. Full stop.

Patents

I'm named inventor of several design patents around the app's most memorable microinteractions. While I was always responsible for managing the project and team, I too chipped in with individual contributions.

Ex-Unicorn

As a reformed unicorn I have the engineering chops to coordinate closely with programmers. Agency-only designers too often look at Engineering as the enemy when really they just want to build cool shit!

Actual bacon practically sells itself, but a cashflow app named Bacon had to be everything fintech isn't.

From product inception the product team knew we needed to create something supremely useful, and now memorable. While the app's UX was my baby, the identity was a collaboration between myself and a talented designer I'd worked with before.

I knew the goal was to build a true product platform and art direction reflected that forethought.

Starting from nothing we built a visual language that would later support additional products and properties flexibly into the future. We created a custom typeface for the logotype, an app logo, illustration style guide, presentation templates, and physical collateral.

Below is a sampling of that work product.

What's most impressive, and what makes me proudest, is knowing that my agency went from zero to a truly mature user-centric organization full of multidisciplinary designers and engineers capable of building such an great product. We did so with less than 15 people, all while balancing other projects, and delivering on a timeline that would make your eyes water. 

At no point was I ever more than a phonecall away from any C or VP level stakeholder, and my abilities to manage that client relationship benefitted the project as a whole. Moreover, my ability to successfully work across entire realms of expertise, managing engineers, designers, researchers, and stakeholders, is something I'm very proud of.