I design where people belong.

My design career started with a Quake II clan site. We needed somewhere to track scores, so I reverse-engineered one with View Source and taught myself the web — you couldn't exactly go to school for it back then. Twenty-some years later I'm still doing what I used to do for fun, now as a UX and design leader who turns tangled problems into things people actually enjoy using.

I lead the UX and design scope end to end, and the front of that matters as much as the design. It starts in the field: I go uncover the real pain points — and the opportunities hiding behind them — to find the problems actually worth solving. Then I get people aligned, translating between stakeholders, product owners, and the teams building it, and turning business goals and customer empathy into a direction a whole org will rally behind. At scale, leading design is as much change management as it is craft: bringing skeptical teams along and keeping everyone pointed at the same outcome. I'd rather grow a great team than be the lone creative behind every pixel — and I care less about my title than about using what I've got to help that team hit its goals.

The other half is making it real. My edge is that I speak engineering — not to write the production code (I did that for years), but to bridge design and development: the DesignOps, design systems, and workflows that keep designers and engineers rowing together. I know how dev teams actually work, so I can guide the build, call which hills are worth dying on, and ship with a lot less rework. I'm happiest when design and engineering stop throwing work over the wall and start building the thing together.

Most recently I spent five years as a design leader at the Defense Digital Service — a small team seated inside the Secretary of Defense's office, working on about as high-altitude as design gets. (There's a longer story there, unusual rooms and all.)

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1. Design is just how you make things better.

   Not decoration or process theater — a tool for improving something real. So point its spear at the things that matter.

2. Go where the work is.

   The answers live wherever the people and the problems actually are, not in a conference room.

3. Design with people, not at them.

   Real user time, workshops, co-creation — never design by decree.

4. Design like you’ll be the one building it.

   I understand how it gets built and shipped, so I design what a team can actually deliver — with a lot less rework.

5. Don’t grow an audience — grow champions.

   Vanity metrics were never the point; the goal is to turn participants into the people who lead the community next.

6. Ship the thing, not the deck.

   Working, user-tested product beats a beautiful slide every time.

7. Raise the whole room. That’s colleaguery.

   The best teams run on mutual support, joy, and shared purpose — my job is to set that tone and carry that water.

8. Do it with conviction, or don’t bother.

   Half-hearted work helps no one. Bring your whole self, or leave it for someone who will.

DCSA — NBIS

Current role

Lead UX & Design Systems · Trusted Workforce 2.0 · present

Orchestrating a dozen systems behind the federal security-clearance process.

On the lead UX team for DCSA's Trusted Workforce 2.0, I helped align a dozen disparate systems that manage the government's background-investigation and adjudication process. I built the unifying design system — components, patterns, and themes on top of USWDS — and established the design, accessibility, and experience guidelines every team works to, backed by a shared component repository that streamlined delivery across development teams. I led multi-day workshops, journey-mapping, and gap analysis, and traveled onsite to stakeholders across DoE, DHS, Army, Navy, and DoS to turn their pain points into end-to-end solutions and accurate roadmaps.

Aligned 12 systemsDesign system + org-wide guidelinesShared components across teams

Congressional testimony on DDS’s work · 2:56 · sound on

Defense Digital Service

GS-15 · TS/SCI

Design Guild Lead · Pentagon · five years

Five years designing mission-critical tools at the Pentagon.

For five years at the Pentagon, I led design on mission-critical projects for service members and defense operations. I traveled to installations and sites around the world to see the work firsthand — and turned outdated processes into tools that actually made people’s jobs easier. As Design Guild Lead I did a bit of everything: high-fidelity prototypes, component systems, advising leadership through the thorny calls. The work I loved most was unblocking stalled initiatives and steering consulting designers through the realities of government projects. I built systems that collected meaningful data and kept teams aligned on both user needs and the mission; my discovery reports often shaped policy, and what we shipped laid the groundwork for the modernization still underway. It was a GS-15 role requiring TS/SCI clearance, so most of the real work stays behind the fence — but I’m always glad to talk through how I approached it.

Discovery → policyPrototypes + component systemsResearch to code

Obama 2012

Webby winner

Lead UX Designer & Design Systems · Obama for America

Design leadership for a campaign that reached millions.

I was one of the first five hires on the Technology team and its design lead, supporting ~70 branded products — including Dashboard, the national field-organizing platform, and a Call Tool behind millions of voter-outreach calls. I set up a code-based style guide and component library so a small team could ship fast, and pushed A/B testing across donations, events, and conversion.

Webby AwardFirst five on the tech teamStyle guide for ~70 products

Public Good Software

Nonprofit

Founding Designer

Connecting people to the local nonprofits they actually care about.

I helped build this one from the ground up: a brand system (logo designed with the great Aaron Draplin), user journeys mapped from real in-person time with nonprofit partners, and the whole interface from wireframes through code — with a living style guide kept honest the whole way.

Founding designerLogo with Aaron DraplinDesign through code

Scripps Health

Design system

UX & DesignOps Lead · Combinaut

One design system behind a healthcare leader’s marketing.

For two years with the Combinaut team, I led UX and design integration for the digital tools major healthcare systems — Scripps Health chief among them — use to run their marketing. I owned UX, HTML/CSS, pattern development, and DesignOps across several workstreams, and built the unified design language the whole platform ran on. Streamlining that system and the theme-deployment pipeline let the team move faster for a demanding, regulated client without losing consistency — design and build in lockstep.

Unified design languageUX + HTML/CSS + DesignOpsFaster theme deployment

FRAIGHT AI — “Archie”

Best in Show

Lead Product Designer

Making an AI logistics assistant feel natural for truckers.

I embedded for a week with drivers and the team, then designed a conversational interface that met people where they already were — email and SMS — instead of making them learn another app. Wireframes were built to actually ship, on a tight timeline, for a big industry demo.

“Best in Show,” FreightWavesA week embedded with driversMet them on email + SMS

Ataraxis Biosciences

0→1

Lead UX Designer

Owning the experience for a food-safety platform, end to end.

I designed the whole experience for real-time drug detection in meat products — workflows, authentication, wireframes, and the high-fidelity screens that made genuinely complex lab procedures feel simple — and set the front-end and accessibility approach the build followed, so it shipped responsive and usable for field users.

0→1, my scope end to endSet the build directionResponsive · accessible

These are a curated few. Twenty years of full case studies, research plans, and visual design samples are a quick email away — happy to walk through whatever's most relevant to your team.

Also worked with

Twenty-five years pulling people up the ladder of engagement.

The same Quake II clan site where I taught myself to build, I was also quietly running on badges and ranks — rewarding people, leveling them up into leaders. I've been turning members into participants, and participants into community champions, ever since. Commuting by bike through Chicago every day pointed that instinct at civic life: you can't ride a city without seeing its civic infrastructure and inequities up close and personal. So I joined my neighborhood association, started a community garden, and never really looked back. Campaigns, nonprofits, journalism-and-technology at Northwestern's Knight Lab, and a decade of local boards and advocacy back home in Eau Claire — different vehicles, one mission: tear down the friction between people and the tools that help them connect, participate, and feel valued.

Front page, Eau Claire Leader-Telegram — my Third Ward neighbors, online and organized. 2015.

The Atlantic on the Obama 2012 tech team I was part of — “When the Nerds Go Marching In,” 2012.

• Founder & co-owner, SHIFT Cyclery & Coffee Bar
• Chair, Eau Claire Bicycle & Pedestrian Advisory Commission
• Brigade Captain, Code for Eau Claire
• Board Vice President, Clear Vision Eau Claire
• Board member, Bike Chippewa Valley & Chippewa Valley Transit Alliance
• Steering Committee, Third Ward Neighborhood Association
• Founder, community gardens in Hamlin Park (Chicago) & Demmler Park (Eau Claire)

These days I want to help build that at real scale — digital public spaces that do for whole communities, especially rural ones, what a good neighborhood association does at its best. Read the full story →