About Me

Biography

I am currently a User Experience Strategist at The Archer Group, where I perform a variety of UX related tasks ranging from Design Strategy to Information Architecture and Usability.

I was previously an Information Architect at Vanguard where I worked on the Institutional Investors website. Previous to that role at Vanguard, I completed Vanguard's Technology Leadership program with three eight-month rotations within the User Experience Group.

Through my blog, inspireUX (www.inspireux.com), I share my passion for user experience by posting quotes and articles to inspire other User Experience Designers.

Interests and goals

I am a User Experience Designer with a passion for creating useful, usable, and desirable products and services. My primary interests lie in the areas of design strategy and information architecture. I view myself as a user experience generalist with the ability to specialize in various disciplines. My long-term career goals include leading cross-discipline user experience teams with a focus on user experience strategy.

My design philosophy

• Design, in the end, is about creating better things for people.
• It's better to learn something new than to be right.
• User Experience should aim to both meet direct user needs and to surprise and delight users with solutions they didn't even know they needed.
• Design is a competitive advantage and differentiator for businesses and should drive strategic decision making across an organization.
• Designers should not wall themselves off from the rest of the organization. Teamwork and collaboration of an entire product team makes great user experiences possible.

What keeps me going

The following quotes sum up the reason why I remain in the User Experience field:

"If you look at some of the best, most inspirational practitioners in our field you'll see that they think of their work, not as a job, but as a calling. They see the impact of technology on people's lives as important. They feel that good design makes the world a better place — and that bad design can make life miserable... Find your passion, pursue it and your career will take care of itself." – David Travis

"What I get to do is take that insight into how people think and how people behave and turn it into something, a product or a service, that is going to make their lives better. It's going to improve their lives in some way that they may not even be able to articulate. To be able to make some small part of their experience better, and all of those little experiences add up to the sum of somebody's life... the ability to touch people in that way is really profound." – Jesse James Garrett