UX Strategy & Analysis

UX Architecture

Interaction Design

Concepting

Mentorship

Axure

Omnigraffle

HTML

CSS

Actionscript

Wordpress

Drupal

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Flash

Adobe After Effects

Videography

Audio for Video

Illustration

Photography

Technical Writing

Provided

Skills

Senior User Experience Architect, Special Projects Team

Responsible for Grainger.com’s cart and checkout pages.  Provided strategic analysis, information architecture, and interaction vision work to introduce modularity to site.  Provided leadership and mentorship to IA’s and Designers.  Guided same in the creation of a standardized UX prototype & specifications document and project-tracking/archiving system.

Grainger

Senior User Experience Architect, IA Lead of Core Experiences

Responsible for all of Sears.com’s core & product experiences: quick-view, bundles, outfits, and product detail pages.  Provided strategy, information architecture, and practical vision work to implement modularity, responsive design, and content delivery.  Introduced prototyping to Sears UX team.  Contributing author to the Sears UX blog.

Sears Holding

2010 - 2013

Information Architect, Interaction Design, Graphic Design, Motion Graphics

Over 16 years experience in interaction and multimedia design, film and video.  Especially skilled at pragmatic strategy, design requirements documents, good usability practice, and effective UX design.  History of collaborating on teams and building them, planning and aesthetics. 

Previous Employment

2008 - 1994

DePaul University - Information Architecture, Interaction Design

Contract Work - Interaction Design, Motion Graphics, Videography

"Land of False Clocks" - Independent Film, Producer

Altrum Technologies - Interaction Design

J. Gleason & Associates - Graphics Production

Axiom Solutions - Interaction & Multimedia Design

Household Retail Services - Graphic Design

Bachelors, Interactive Media

3.9 GPA, Magna cum laude, Upsilon Pi Epsilon honor society, Golden Key honor society.

DePaul University, CDM

2006 - 2009

Associates, Interactive Media

3.9 GPA, Two time student achievement award winner.

IADT

1996 - 1998

Virtual Supply Room

Analyzed, conceptualized, and prototyped a modular redesign of Grainger.com’s cart and checkout pages.  Re-imagined as a single, unified experience based on order management, the new ‘Virtual Supply Room’ would serve the needs of procurement over shopping.

Search and Select

Analyzed and researched product search on Grainger.com to aid ongoing initiative.  Identified low risk, low effort innovation offering promise to significantly improve search for 47% of site visitors.  Created presentation to pitch concept.

Bundles Page

Conceptualized, executed, and launched a modular, group-selling page accommodating over 100,000 product types from over 20 business divisions.  Projected to make 50 million dollars in incremental revenue its first year.

Product Detail Page

Strategized, planned, and created user interaction for a ground-up redesign of the Sears product detail page.  Defined roadmap for migrating the Sears bundles and home pages to the new modular framework.

Q&A Social Research

Conceptualized & researched a new, community-based question & answer experience for “Manage My Life,” a Sears advice and content site involving social searching, community building, gamifcation, and crowd-sourced moderation.

Gifting Experience

Conceptualized and prototyped an integrated gift-giving, advice-based, & social shopping experience.  Launched phase 1 of same, a redesign of the Sears gift card experience which increased gift card sales by 30%

2008 - 2009

2002 - 2010

1999 - 2002

1998 - 1999

1997 - 1998

1994 - 1995

1993 - 1994

Product Design

3.5 GPA.

Illinois Institute of Technology, School of Design

1988 - 1992

2013 - present

Senior User Experience Architect, Special Projects Team

Responsible for Grainger.com’s cart and checkout pages.  Provided strategic analysis, information architecture, and interaction vision work to introduce modularity to site.  Provided leadership and mentorship to IA’s and Designers.  Guided same in the creation of a standardized UX prototype & specifications document and project-tracking/archiving system.

Grainger

Senior User Experience Architect, IA Lead of Core Experiences

Responsible for all of Sears.com’s core & product experiences: quick-view, bundles, outfits, and product detail pages.  Provided strategy, information architecture, and practical vision work to implement modularity, responsive design, and content delivery.  Introduced prototyping to Sears UX team.  Contributing author to the Sears UX blog.

Sears Holding

2010 - 2013

Bachelors, Interactive Media

3.9 GPA, Magna cum laude, Upsilon Pi Epsilon honor society, Golden Key honor society.

DePaul University, CDM

2006 - 2009

Associates, Interactive Media

3.9 GPA, Two time student achievement award winner.

IADT

1996 - 1998

Product Design

3.5 GPA.

Illinois Institute of Technology, School of Design

1988 - 1992

2013 - present

Information Architect, Interaction Designer

Conceptualized, planned, and implemented a 3D touch screen interface for DePaul CDM’s school kiosk. Defined concept, created extensive requirements document, sketches, and storyboards, generated concepts, graphic mockups, and animatics.

DePaul University

Interaction Design, Digital Video

Art directed an animation based, interactive presentation tool. Devised concept, wrote script, provided illustration, design, and animation. Assembled and managed a team of 5 production specialists and 3 actors.

Contract Work

2002 - 2010

2008 - 2009

Producer & Co-creator

Created a feature length, independent film. Co-wrote screenplay, organized preproduction, created storyboards, ran audio & camera for independent film. Created titles, visual effects, color correction, and assisted editing.

Independent Film, "Land of False Clocks"

Interaction Designer

Designed strategic concept and GUI for a client side, web based, training development application.

Altrum Technologies

1999 - 1999

1999 - 2002

Graphic Artist

J. Gleason & Associates

1997 - 1998

Multimedia Designer

Designed graphics, animations, and touch interface for 3 training pieces for medical diagnostic equipment.

Axiom Solutions

Graphic Designer

Household Retail Services

1993 - 1994

1994 - 1995

15+ years in interaction and multimedia design conceptualizing, planning, and implementing innovative and effective user experiences for new media.

Information Architect & User Experience Designer

Bundles Page

A new page presenting a curated group of products sharing a common premise on Sears.com. First year revenue: $50 million.

Product Detail Page

A ground up rebuild/redesign of the Sears product page introducing modularity and responsive design. Page bounce rate reduced 22%.

Search & Select

A joint business and UX research and analysis initiative to locate opportunities to greatly improve product search at Grainger.

Gifting Experience

A reboot of gift products, service, and features on sears.com. Gift card revenue increased 30%.

Accomplishments

Senior User Experience Architect, Special Projects Team at Grainger from 2013 - present.

Present Employment

Senior User Experience Architect & IA Lead of Core Experiences at Sears from 2010 – 2013.

Information Architect, Interaction Designer at DePaul University from 2008 – 2009.

Interaction Design, Digital Video Contract Work from 2002 – 2010.

Producer & Co-creator of film “Land of False Clocks” from 1999 – 2002.

Interaction Designer at Altrum Technologies from 1999 – 1999.

Graphic Artist at J. Gleason & Associates from 1997 – 1998.

Multimedia Designer at Axiom Solutions from 1994 – 1995.

Graphic Designer at Household Retail Services from 1993 – 1994.

Past Employment

DePaul CDM, Interactive Media from, 2006 – 2009.

IADT, Interactive Media, from 1996 – 1998.

IIT, School of Design, Product Design, from 1988 – 1992.

Education

Adobe Flash, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator, Visio, Omnigraffle, Axure, HTML, CSS, Actionscript 3.0, Drupal, WordPress, Adobe After Effects, Videography, Audio for Video, Lighting for Video, Illustration, Photography, Technical Writing

Skills

How do you increase AOV for Sears?  How do you create a page that displays up 32 related products?  By embracing premise.

User decision making

Interest shopping

Configuration experiences

Comparison experiences

Relative perception

User context

Currated shopping content

Modularity

"How to Make Choosing Easier"

"The Mere Categorization Effect"

"Moderating the Too-Much-Choice Effect"

Challenges

UX & E-commerce Concepts

UX Research

How do you significantly improve product searching on Grainger's B2B site?  By knowing when not to search.

Innovation vs. iteration

UX analysis

Site analytics

Circular reasoning

Subjectivity

Assumptions

"How to Make Choosing Easier"

"The Mere Categorization Effect"

"Moderating the Too-Much-Choice Effect"

Challenges

UX & E-commerce Concepts

UX Research

How do you take a mature product page, make it adaptable to users, and adjustable by business unit?  Modularity.

Modularity

Personalization

Customization

User context

Responsive Design

User decision making

Interest shopping

"How to Make Choosing Easier"

"The Mere Categorization Effect"

"Moderating the Too-Much-Choice Effect"

Challenges

UX & E-commerce Concepts

UX Research

Whether choosing products or comparing prices, conscious, rational thought takes a back seat to emotion and subjective bias.  How should the needs of irrationality change the UX of

e-commerce sites?

Relative perception

Selling with decoys

Comparison experiences

The power of FREE

User context

Interests vs. categories

Wanting vs. needing

Exploring vs. searching

"How to Make Choosing Easier"

"The Mere Categorization Effect"

"Moderating the Too-Much-Choice Effect"

Challenges

UX & E-commerce Concepts

UX Research

Trying to improve your UX teamwork?  Dump the org chart and create a workflow map.  This deck will show you how.

What's it for?

Org charts are idealistic - showing what department heads wish was true (that rank grants control), rather than what is (that links between workflows do).

The Theory

Still trying to wrap your head around responsive design?  This presentation of basic terms, concepts, and examples can help. 

PROPS: to Ethan Marcotte for his book, "Responsive Web Design" from which this presentation drew heavily. 

What's it for?

Props

While responsive design thinking appeared as a reaction to the growing variety of web enabled devices, it exists to serve people, not machines.

The Theory

Flow charts were invented by mechanical engineers.  The goal flow is my UX-friendly overhaul.

What's it for?

Flow charts focus on actions biasing UX solutions away from emotions and exploratory navigation.  A new flow chart is needed that embraces the complexity of decision making.

The Theory

Part of the unified Gifting Experience concept, GiveTogether would allow a group of friends to pool their money and jointly gift shop for another.  Integration with Facebook provided the mechanism for inviting contacts.  I also got to play copywriter on this one.

Never built, I always thought the idea could have been big.

Sears GiveTogether

Though the original design had neither bugs nor usability errors, this 2 week redesign improved gift card sales 30%.  Key was improving engagement by shifting design priority from card dollar value, to card design selection.

Sears Gift Cards

This mother of all template pages pushed my UX chops more than its humble appearance suggests.  Almost every part is a variable.  Anywhere from 4-32 products, organized into 2-8 categories offering 4 different kinds of product choice.

To learn more see, "Shopping by Premise"

Sears Bundles

Case Study

A partner project for the Sears bundles page, Outfits presented fashion magazine-like photography, then allowed users to buy the cloths to build the outfit for themselves.

Sears Outfits

Co-created with Brett Brigham.

Props

This was a rare opportunity - UX architecture lead for a ground-up redesign and rebuild of the Sears product page.  We took on modularity, application design, and responsive design.

To learn more see, "Personal Product Page"

Sears Product Page

Case Study

This motivation platform was a personal project - a phone app allowing users to set small personal goals & rewards to drive positive habit formation.

Step

Never built, this proposed experience design for DePaul pushed some UX boundaries exploring what I called '3D interface' - using Z depth to convey design priority merged with touch interaction.  No goggles necessary.

DePaul Touchscreen Kiosk

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DePaul Touchscreen Kiosk

Never built, this proposed experience design for DePaul pushed some UX boundaries exploring what I called '3D interface' - using Z depth to convey design priority merged with touch interaction.  No goggles necessary.

DePaul Touchscreen Kiosk

This iphone app was one of many comprising Sears Digital Journey - a concept to merge all store functions onto an iPod Touch.  Device Tracker monitored the iPod Touches themselves, preventing employee theft.

Devise Tracker

The film was not good and went nowhere, but I'm still proud of it anyway.

No, it's not on Netflix.

Logo design by Kent Henderson.

Land of False Clocks

Props

This flow chart demonstrates product search contexts within need-based shopping.  The user's confidence in their understanding of the product they seek, defines how they behave during a search.

User Context Flow

This in-depth research effort sought to better understand the nature of Question and Answer sites such as Quora and Stack Exchange.  I found the crowd-sourced moderation mechanisms of both sites to be quite ingenious.

Coauthored with Sam Rhea.

Q&A Competative Analysis

Props

A diagram illustrating my proposed rollout plan of safety content on Grainger.com.

Safety Plan

A diagram demonstrating how Grainger customers engage the safety subject both online and offline.

Safety Entry Points

This diagram layers a user story of a product search over a confidence spectrum.  It demonstrates how an experience can erode a user's confidence to defeat add to cart conversion.

User Confidence Story