My Experience

2022 Metaplex - Head of Product Design

2021 Metaplex - Head of Product + Design

2020 Facebook Reality Labs - Design Manager on Input Explorations Team

2019 Sabbatical

2017 Facebook - Design Manager (acting Director) on Profile & Identity

2016 Facebook - Lead Designer on Camera Effects Platform (Augmented Reality)

2015 Facebook - App Install Ads Platform

2014 Scaled Inference (machine learning startup) - Head of Design

2013 Amazon - Lead UX Designer for all Browse Navigation

2012 Amazon - Senior UX Designer for Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry

2011 Abercrombie & Fitch - UX Design & Research Lead

2009 Freelance - User Experience & Information Architecture

2007 Resource Interactive (agency) - Information Architect & Graphic Designer

2004 Freelance - Visual & Graphic Design

Metaplex

2021 - 2022: HEAD OF PRODUCT DESIGN

Lead Product and Design for a startup that created the standard for NFTs on the Solana blockchain. In summer 2022 I shifted my focus back to Product Design. During the time I led Product and Design, Metaplex became the worlds largest NFT ecosystem with 15 Million NFTs minted, and $3 Billion in Creator earnings.

Facebook Reality Labs

2020 - 2021: DESIGN MANAGER, INPUT EXPLORATIONS TEAM

Design manager leading a pathfinding team exploring new ways people will interact in VR/MR/AR in the future.  Directly responsible for overall project planning, process, and execution quality - as well as the team’s career growth.  Led successful demos of future tech with senior FRL leadership that informed key roadmap planning decisions, working under intense deadlines, while still receiving extremely high review scores from my team and partners.  Maintained a flexible, dynamic approach to problem solving, quickly reacting to changing requirements and project needs.

I loved working on this team, and only left because of an extra-ordinary opportunity with a close friend who asked me to join him as he became CEO of Metaplex. If not for that, I’d still be over there on the IX Team - a group of some of the most amazing folks I’ve ever worked with!

Sabbatical

2019-2020: DAD, HUSBAND, CAMPER VAN ENTHUSIAST

For over a decade, I had been inspired by people who choose to take a little time from retirement, and use it earlier in life. After nearly four years at Facebook, I took the leap. It was a great year. I was able to pause, give the world and myself a bit more attention, travel, and invest extra time with my family (especially my kids before they hit their teen years).

Facebook (Managing)

2017 - 2019: DESIGN LEAD & MANAGER ON PROFILE & IDENTITY

The team I led on Profile designed & successfully shipped key strategic projects, including:  FB Stories on Profile, an entire redesign of FB Profile on desktop and mobile, and several critical projects to improve safety and control for people in sensitive situations (after someone has died, or in countries where sharing is risky).  This required close collaboration with many teams across the FB organization.   I managed a team over two locations, and was also acting Design Lead for Profile overall for eight months.  This meant operating at a director level, helping drive team structure, staffing, product priorities & strategy.  

My team was responsible for the Core Experience on Profile. This included:

• FB Stories & Highlights on Profile

• Updating Profile on Desktop, Mobile and iOS & Android apps to a new FB-wide visual style

• Profile structure, flows and information architecture

• Contextual profiles (limited view of your identity and activity shown within a Group, Marketplace, etc.)

• Features for sharing updates & managing your profile

• Quality of design details in final builds that shipped

• Supporting Profile on FB Lite (a lightweight android only version of FB used in developing countries)

• Supporting Profile Safety (making it easier to lock down your profile and be aware of who sees what you share)

• Profile Memorialization (what happens to a profile if a person passes away)

• Identity, and how people think about sharing, safety and interacting with different audiences

Facebook (Product Designer)

2016 - 2017

CAMERA EFFECTS PLATFORM (AUGMENTED REALITY)

As FB explored opportunities for Augmented Reality in it’s camera, we created a platform for external partners to build, ship and manage custom AR effects on the FB app.  We also supported the creation and roll out of high profile effects.  These included Nike (Nike Run Club), DC Comics & Warner Bros (Justice League movie), GIPHY and more.  My work included meeting with our clients, assisting agencies creating effects, overseeing the design of our platform. 

One of the most challenging and fun effects we created would turn a person into any of five characters for the then soon to be released Justice League movie, and show part of their superpowers. The actual actors from the movie even played around with the effects at a promotional event.

AR @ FB Design Summit

During this time, I also organized and led the first AR Summit at FB.  A two day internal event that brought together every design team working on augmented reality (and some VR folks too) across all of FB to share their roadmaps and learnings so far.  It bridged a significant awareness gap inside the company, helped build relationships across teams, reduce churn and duplicated work, and was praised by senior leadership (Boz).

APP INSTALL ADS PLATFORM

In 2015, over 20% of FB’s revenue was generated by one small team:  the app install ads team.  I was the lead designer for that team, a role that required significant collaboration across the FB Ads ecosystem.  During this time the Seattle FB design team was still very small and there were not enough resources for all projects.  So I also supported six other teams in Seattle, helping them hit their goals for the first half of 2016, and received a rare and special acknowledgement within the company.

Scaled Inference

2014 - 2015

Head of design for a machine intelligence startup in the heart of silicon valley. Responsible for all branding, user experience and visual design. 

During my time at SI, I created multiple product concepts, user experience flows, wireframes and sitemaps.  I also learned a lot about designing for machine intelligence and data visualization, researched the machine learning industry and competitive landscape, designed two brands (parent and product), and did any other misc design tasks that were helpful. 

SI is based in Palo Alto, and I worked remotely from Seattle.

Amazon.com

2012 - 2014

Browse Shopping & Navigation

I was the lead senior user experience designer for all shopping navigation at Amazon.com.  I spent most of that year planning a large scale re-design for the global navigation that spanned all platforms and devices, overseeing a revamp of the Android app and Fire tablet nav, working closely with front-end dev to update and optimize the nav code-base, and collaborating with our partners in China on a more CN-centric solution. 

Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry

In 2013 I was the lead senior ux designer for Amazon's Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry department, where we did an overhaul of the entire taxonomy and fundamental user flows. That project launched summer 2014 and had a very significant positive impact on revenue.  I also did a lot of misc updates, including a new department landing page.

amazon design Scope

For both of these roles, I was responsible for the desktop, tablet and phone versions of the Amazon.com website in all countries, as well as the shopping apps on iOS, Android, Kindle, and Windows tablets and phones. All designs were driven by quantitative and qualitative data, based on user behavior observed via site metrics and usability testing.

Abercrombie & Fitch

2011 - 2012

When I joined A&F as the Lead User Experience Designer, the first thing we did was overhaul the taxonomy and navigation (header & footer) on all sites, which improved overall usability (and sales). Then we redesigned checkout, updated my-account, added search, improved the product detail page, and added a mobile version of the website. I planned and oversaw global usability research in multiple countries, built our own internal usability lab, managed a usability researcher and designer, and created a concept for a hybrid persona / user demographics document. We did this for all four A&F brands at the same time (A&F, abercrombie kids, Hollister, Gilly Hicks).  Lastly, right before I finished at A&F, I did a website redesign concept.

Consulting

Craft & Motive, and Leimgruber Ltd. were two Design, UX & IA consulting businesses that I started back in 2004.  They are combined here because they represent similar work.

While consulting, I have done work for Amazon, Honda, The Home Depot, Bath & Body Works, Joyent, TypePad, Amerisource Bergen, TravelPort, The Ohio State University (both the Medical Center and the Alumni Association), Harley Davidson, and Abercrombie & Fitch.

I still do an occasional side project here or there.

Amazon Fresh (2015)

Resource Interactive (agency)

2007 - 2009

Various information architecture work including site maps, wireframes, user flows, content audits, style guides, design concepts and production. 

While at Resource, I researched and designed a global site architecture and UI that consolidated 39 different websites for the biggest hair care brand in the world (Pantene). I also designed a site architecture and UI for Herbal Essences that they chose to use as their global design, helped optimize AutoZone's e-commerce site, created pitch concepts for Coca-Cola, HP and Lean Cuisine, built a style guide for The Scotts MiracleGro Company, and worked on numerous websites and micro-site experiences for Clairol, Head & Shoulders, Aussie, and The People's Choice Awards.