For over twenty-five years I have successfully enhanced web-based SAAS and eCommerce digital experiences for users.
Design management. Management of the design process including coordinating planning, execution, and evaluation.
Empatheitc designer. User-centric and user-first design. Customer-focused and data-driven. Adheres to web standards. Always.
Years of testing, designing, reiterating, developing, managing, producing and launching responsive web applications and mobile websites.
Decades of experiece working with teams and launching digital experiences with developers, executives, sales, designers, stakeholders, quality engineers and more.
Team player, creative visionary, storyteller, promoter of technology and a passionate, empathetic and curious designer.
Overview: Skreens produces devices that link numerous HDMI sources to a single high-definition monitor.
Challenge: The current home screen displayed minimal information and was not visually appealing.
Users: Broadcast professionals, Gamers, Medical Professionals.
My Role: Collaborating with the Chief Product Officer, I designed multiple versions of the new default "Home" screen.
Process: Competitor research, design iterations and on-site meetings with both the product team and Founder/Owner of Skreens.
Outcome: Below is the home screen concept I crafted for the device's power-on and default sequence display.
Overview: Skreens produces devices that link numerous HDMI sources to a single high-definition monitor.
Challenge: The current website was dated and did not showcase the product well.
Users: Broadcast professionals, Gamers, Medical Professionals.
My Role: Collaborating with the Chief Product Officer, I designed a new homepage for their existing website.
Process: Competitor research, design iterations and on-site meetings with both the product team and Founder/Owner of Skreens.
Outcome: Below is the homepage design I crafted for their corporate website, which showcased product capabilities and features.
Overview: American Family Insurance is a private mutual insurance company that offers a variety of insurance products.
Challenge: The current home insurance quote website needed too much manual input from the user and there were too many calls to our call center for help and assistance in filling out the forms.
Users: Individuals, families, small enterprises, corporate entities.
My Role: On-site, hands-on lead designer and director.
Process: Collaborating with marketing, product management, and IT, we streamlined the quote flow and included inline user assistance.
Outcome: Revamped the home insurance quote flow with pre-filled answers, inline chat, and video assistance, leading to an 18% increase in completed forms and a 12% decrease in call-center assistance.
Overview: Homesite Insurance provides property and casualty coverage, including home, renters, condo, and commercial insurance.
Challenge: Homesite aimed to expand into life insurance but faced challenges in quoting and binding policies online.
Users: U.S. homeowners, renters, and condo owners seeking life insurance as a standalone or bundled product.
My Role: Directed product research, user testing and design concepts.
Process: Collaborating with marketing, product management, design, and IT, we created a new concise life insurance flow.
Outcome: Efficient Homesite-branded flow guiding users to easily obtain online life insurance without medical exams.
Overview: Homesite Insurance wanted to offer a life insurance product under an entirely new brand - Banyan Life.
Challenge: My design team researched patents and copyrights to launch a new life insurance product and company.
Users: U.S. homeowners, renters, and condo owners seeking life insurance as a standalone or bundled product.
My Role: Directed product research, user testing, copyright and patent research plus design concepts.
Process: Collaborating across teams, we launched a streamlined life insurance flow with a fresh brand.
Outcome: New Banyan Life Insurance-branded flow guiding users to easily obtain online life insurance without medical exams.
Overview: American Family Insurance is a private mutual insurance company that offers a variety of insurance products.
Challenge: American Family Insurance aimed to offer a chat interface for customers during policy purchase and management.
Users: Individuals, families.
My Role: On-site, hands-on lead designer and director.
Process: Generated multiple concepts for potential chat interfaces, iterated with the IT team.
Outcome: American Family chat interface concept, as seen below.
Overview: SS&C Technologies sells software and SaaS to the financial services industry.
Challenge: SS&C lacked comprehensive insights into their users' software and usage patterns.
Users: SS&C primarily serves asset management, wealth management, brokerage, retirement, and financial advisory sectors.
My Role: On-site, hands-on senior UX designer, I lead the gathering of internal customer research.
Process: Conducted on-site user interviews, gathered and synthesized feedback, created user journeys, and presented findings to management.
Outcome: SS&C added features based on obtained feedback, tied them to Jira user stories, and integrated them into our software to address missing functionalities.
Overview: Homesite Insurance partnered with GEICO Insurance for a private-labelled online home insurance offering.
Challenge: GEICO desired our Homesite online quote flow to mirror the appearance and functionality of their own offerings.
Users: GEICO's target audience is males and females ages 24-64.
My Role: I was the hands-on lead designer.
Process: I replicated the entire look and feel of the GEICO website for the Homesite insurance product, using both user interface elements and code.
Outcome: Homesite and GEICO successfully joined forces to provide a seamless home insurance option, allowing GEICO customers to easily bundle it with their auto insurance.
Overview: Homesite Insurance partnered with Progressive Insurance for a private-labelled online renters insurance offering.
Challenge: Progressive Insurance desired our Homesite online quote flow to mirror the appearance and functionality of their own offerings.
Users: Progressive Insurance target market is adults between the ages of 31 and 45.
My Role: I was the hands-on lead designer.
Process: I replicated the entire look and feel of the Progressive Insurance website for the Homesite insurance product, using both user interface elements and code.
Outcome: Homesite and Progressive successfully joined forces to provide a seamless renters insurance option, allowing Progressive customers to easily bundle it with their auto insurance.
Overview: CoStar Group offers commercial real estate data, analytics, and insights.
Challenge: CoStar Group's many online offerings were visually fractured without design consistency and required simpler and more uniform methods to rapidly assemble Figma design concepts.
Users: CoStar's globally-distributed design and development teams.
My Role: Design manager and lead designer for our Cosmos 2.0 design library.
Process: Working closely with the Washington, D.C.-based design team and the London, UK-based development team, I assembled new modular Figma components and tied them to design tokens, along with creating responsive page templates and documentation.
Outcome: Unified the many CoStar Group online apps and offerings together with a cohesive and comprehensive Figma-based design library - called Cosmos 2.0 - making it easier and quicker for designers to assemble pixel-perfect, on-brand and on-spec design prototpes that align with development requirements.
Overview: CoStar Group offers commercial real estate data, analytics, and insights.
Challenge: CoStar Group's Lender software had a clunky, multi-step on-boarding process within the administrative section that customers and internal management did not like.
Users: CoStar's target audience is tenants looking for commercial space; 64.26% male and 35.74% female, 45-54 year olds.
My Role: I was the hands-on design manager and lead designer.
Process: Working closely with the Boston, MA-based product management team, I designed wireframes and high-fidelity Figma-based clickable prototypes.These new designs replaced a legacy, PC-based native application into a modern, SAAS web-based app.
Outcome: Improved onboarding efficiency by replacing a labor-intensive, single-property import process with a multi-upload feature, allowing the simultaneous import of thousands of properties. This redesign, which included the addition of a visual dashboard, led to a 32% increase in new user adoption.
CoStar Design Library
CoStar Lender Admin Section
American Family app design
Life insurance product design
Life insurance concept design
American Family chat concept
SS&C User Profile Research
GEICO private label app
Progressive Insurance renters app
Skreens "Home" display
Skreens web design
I design responsive experiences that work across a wide-spectrum of internet-conencted devices and browsers. Fast load times utilizing font-based icons, scalable vector graphics and CSS libraries that focus on usability, scalability, easy maintenence, compatibility and speed. I am an effective digital communicator and producer.
I believe user interface consistency is one of the strongest contributors to usability. Complying to design standards and conventions, along with clean, focused interaction design is key in helping users trust and engage with digital experiences. Fast load times are expected by users.
User research and testing is a vital part of the design process. As a designer, I cannot assume that people interpret or understand patterns, ideas or symbols in the same way I do. A big part of my responsibilities incliude putting myself into the shoes of the user and to feel deep empathy for their emotions, desires, expectations and motivations.
I work with HTML, PHP and other templating engines such as PUG. I am a believer in clean, semantically structured markup. I style with CSS preprocessors such as LESS, SASS and Stylus to generate mobile-friendly and modular styling that adheres to BEM methodology.
Clicks and sales were not where they should be. I was tasked to explore ways we could increase user flows deeper into the sales funnel to help conversions. There was considerable user drop-off on certain pages within the application. Optional (and profitable) endorsements were not being purchased by customers.
As a private-labelled enterprise, Homesite has great responsibility to keep a consistent user interface and logical experience for the user. Working with the analytics team and business leaders, my suggestions, improvements, concepts and design modifications were incorporated into the revamped flow.
Analytics showed that users were not only purchasing the product in greater numbers due to reduced drop-off and increased exposure, but optional endorsements were also being purchased without hindering user flow. This resulted in $2.7 million dollars in increased monthly sales.
I lead the creative direction of a series of full-screen tablet advertisements. Targeting new and growing families, these designs showcased the growing itinerary of insurance services and products that Homesite provided.
For several years, I have worked out of my home-office, designing and programming web experiences for local, Boston-based businesses. One of my clients, Hackett Feinberg, P.C., an area law firm, needed a modern web presence. They also needed the ability to edit their site themselves, whether it is uploading files such as images or PDF's, or updating news, practices and other sections.
I built their new website on WordPress, with Themify incorporated. This allowed the editability and flexibility that they needed while also providing a secure, stable, well-supported CMS in addition to supplying a modern, responsive and easy-to-navigate design that fits the client - and their customers - needs.
I managed and oversaw the UX and UI design of the new Homesite customer service website. This responsive website was the first point-of-contact for our Homesite and partner customers. The goal was to have all of the servicing, claims functionality and information at the customers fingertips, while reducing calls to the call center.