Problem solving through design.
Solutions that delight millions
A quick peek at a few of the real problems I've solved for real people.
Help artists release their music faster?
DistroKid is used by nearly 2 million artists around the world to distribute their music to platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, and TikTok, contributing nearly 40% of all new music released. I led the first-ever major refactoring of our music distribution experience, the core of our entire business.
After identifying a few of the key issues that were causing the majority of our customer frustrations, I developed new patterns to clarify key requirements, improved the information architecture to simplify the collection of artist and music data, and designed the new experience to be mobile first. I even worked alongside our engineering team in the codebase to directly translate my requirements into working code. The new user experience reduced errors incurred by our artists, reduced their overall time on task, and improved the rate of successful first-time uploads.
Simplify the process of ordering title & escrow?
As the sole designer on the new products team at Snapdocs, a real estate tech company focused on powering the perfect closing, I drove the discovery, research, and design for an entirely new product that sought to simplify the process ordering of title and escrow, one of the most tedious aspects of the mortgage industry.
While our MVP helped to validate the problem, the successive iterations I designed truly helped to simplify the workload of our customers, reduce their time on task, and drive down our internal COGS. I focused next on scaling our product and developed automated processes, designed efficient document sharing and delivery systems, and integrated machine learning automation for the most crucial component of our product—document review and error detection. By the time I left, I had helped advance the product to the number four firm priority in just over a year. Read more about my work at Snapdocs
Surface the value of videos for our customers?
Vbrick Rev is a live streaming and on-demand enterprise video platform trusted by some of the world's largest organizations to webcast global events with up to 100,000 simultaneous participants. Rev also serves as a VOD repository, housing thousands of hours of data-rich content for these organizations.
As the lead designer at the company, I championed the initiative to refactor the UI our Rev EVP platform, as well as led the research and design of numerous features to enable our users to maximize the value of their VOD libraries. I designed our translate and transcribe feature, which allowed customers to automatically generate searchable transcripts and editable time-stamped subtitles for their videos in over 20 languages. I designed our native WebRTC experience and refactored our native video editor to streamline production workflows, enabling our users to save time on content creation. These are just a few of the value-driven features I led while at Vbrick. Read more about my work at Vbrick.
A quick peek into my design process.
Methodologies can be highly subjective. The approach I favor is far from perfect, but it has served me well throughout my career. I even created this infographic to illustrate the iterative nature of my process!
While not all design problems are created equal, and solutions are rarely arrived upon in the same manner, real human needs should be at the center of every approach.
Identify and research the problem, and empathize with your users to guide the design direction. Evaluate designs against standards and best practices to provide a solid foundation. Evaluate with users to evolve the design, then iterate to refine it. Sure, there may be time or budget constraints, shifting business requirements, or other outside influences that may impact the process, but in the end, a simple, elegant solution that delights users is always my primary objective.
Identify the need or design problem...
Tools of the trade
Extensive experience. Exceptional skillset.
UX & Product Design
UI, Video, & Visual Design
Front-End & Mobile Dev
Kind words from my colleagues...
Sometimes you gotta just have fun
The Experience Belize travel app
When our spring break trip to Belize fell victim to the international travel ban in 2020, I searched for a creative outlet for my newfound free time. We had spent several weeks planning a perfect vacation, compiling a list of activities, experiences, restaurants, and destinations we wanted to check out, pinning their locations on Google Maps, bookmarking websites in Chrome, and adding contact information, dates, links, and an ever-changing itinerary to a shared Google Doc.
I explored the concept of a travel planning app that sought to eliminate many of the frustrations related to planning and organization that I encountered in my more traditional means of travel planning. Inspired by travelbelize.org, the website of the Belize Tourism Board I discovered later in our planning stages, the idea for the Experience Belize travel app was born.
Exploring microinteractions in After Effects
Before I built out all of the necessary screens in XD, I decided to experiment with some nuanced microinteractions in Adobe After Effects with just a few of the primary screens.
Screen interactions in Adobe XD
I designed the rest of the screens and associated components, then added interactions and animations in XD—an arduous task, but one that was necessary to communicate the vision and value of the app.
The Experience Belize travel app demo
With the prototype up and running, I decide write a script and record a demo of the app. I happened to be playing around with kinetic typography in After Effects at the time, so I used that as a reason to go a little bit overboard with the final video. I screen recorded the demo, recorded a voiceover with my Samson podcasting mic, and produced the raw demo video with just the screen capture and voice. I dropped that file into my other AE file with the kinetic typography and wrapped it in an iPhone template to produce the final video below.
** 2023 Edit **—nobody likes the sound of their own voice, so I decided to evaluate the accuracy, inflection, and tone of a few of the AI text-to-voice generators available today. I fed the script through a few different products, with some being utterly laughable and others convincingly real. The female British voice used in this video was the clear winner, with tone and inflection matching well with the content it was reading. There are a few audible hiccups here and there, but overall, I was very pleased by the authenticity of the result.
More from my design portfolio.
In addition to the case studies above, here are a half-dozen of my favorite design projects from the past few years. Coming Soon...
