My passion for visual balance and symmetry, line structures, and simple yet bold colors started as a small child noticing graffiti for the first time while walking to school in the McKinley Park neighborhood on Chicago's Southwest Side. Soon, I went from sketching video game characters to letters and eventually painting my own Chicago-style straight letters. This is where I developed my drive to create pixel-perfect visuals.

 

My introspective nature led me to study Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There, I developed a firm understanding of behavioral and cognitive concepts like active listening, empathy, cognitive bias, positive reinforcement, etc. Today, this foundation helps observation, discovery, pattern recognition, and the habit of digging a level deeper.

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These experiences were key, but the most pivotal part of my journey to UX was as a salesperson at CDW, a leading technology sales company. It was here that I got my first exposure to product teams and UX as a user, participating in discovery and testing sessions to improve their CRM. At CDW, I learned how to make interactions and complicated processes simple and positive for the customer/end user. It was a trial by fire atmosphere that ingrained problem-solving/preventing behaviors into me because if something went wrong in the sales process, I didn't get paid and essentially worked for free. That job also gave me the skills to sell ideas and present to stakeholders and team members, which I use heavily in my UX practice. Also, it gave me a technical mindset, which comes in handy in complex domains and when collaborating with tech-proficient team members.

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Since then, I've led the design of enterprise-level applications at CVS Health and Caremark until my department's budget was nuked by massive federal lawsuits in the summer of 2024. While at CVS, I led design workshops, executive stakeholder meetings, and the creation of two new applications, which saved millions and transformed processes and experiences. Also, I led a group of designers on a side project to standardize the look and feel of an ecosystem of applications. I was a valuable team member and resource who would quickly offer help to my teammates and was an essential contributor in weekly accessibility meetings. Product owners and leaders also requested that I tackle critical projects.

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Prior to CVS, I worked at Ensono a global IT managed services provider as the sole designer of theirsupporting 3 global development teams on the  client portal team. Here I was tasked with deciphering the complex domain of IT and delivering digestible data visualization dashboards and service task flows to keep clients happy and their services running. The work we did there was innovative and we came up with many new features and modules that didn't exist yet. This led to greater client engagement, especially from key decision makers. I also created a design system in figma to increase consistency and reduce tech debt. This also gave POs a sandbox to hop in and visually brainstorm their ideas for new features.

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I also managed the AIGA Chicago mentorship program for two years during the crazy covid days. This was a great lesson in adaptability and testing new ideas, as we had to figure out how to deliver valuable programming to a200person group virtually. User reasearch skills came in handy and but unfortunately we could never get engagement to match where it was for the physical experience. Uncertainty was too high, and morale was too low as it is much harder to network virtually for many people.

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I'm currently looking for my next UX/Producrt design role. My strengths are wireframing  clean and intuitive interactions and task flows, high-fidelity prototypes, user interviews and large group discovery sessions, facilitating design workshops, and leading teamates towards an objecrtive goal, problem solving, and stakeholder management, and producing favorable business and usability outcomes. 

My B.S. in Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign is the foundation of my research practice and systems thinking mentality. I'm an amateur artist with a keen attention to detail, and a visual thinker with a penchant for whiteboarding and leading discussions with colleagues.

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I'm an outcomes-based thinker and understand how to set conditions to achieve a desired effect. Most importantly, I'm good with people and understand how to lead groups, both large and small, towards results. If you need a great problem solver, hard-worker, and team-player to help with a project, give me a shout.

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Thanks for stopping by!