Saved by grace • Husband, Father • UX Designer

Over 20 years of experience working with government agencies across the world, international brands, neighborhood businesses, mom-and-pop’s, and everything in between. In my current role at Pega, I am a UX Manager, the Design Ops Lead, and help drive our design system, Constellation, toward accessibility out-of-the-box for Fortune 100 companies.

I’m upbeat, self-taught, creative, enjoy a laugh, hard-working, and sometimes even get an idea or two into the core of the web itself!

You can also find me on LinkedIn.

What I’ve done

Accessibility

Everything modern seems to be digital. My family, friends, and church members with disabilities are struggling to adapt. Yet designers deliver pretty pictures and hope for the best. It’s not enough.

I’ve spent the last few years educating organizations, legal teams, design and dev team members, and myself what the challenges are, what the law is, and what semantic code looks and sounds like.

I piloted live accessibility testing with our UX testers. I’ve cajoled business stakeholders to fix accessibility because they legally can’t sell products. And I spend time in the weeds with devs and in-house assistive technology users evaluating preferences and patterns. I’ve gathered like-minded people across the org for summits and steering committees to drive accessibility holistically.

With these groups, we’ve driven real change. There has been a slew of new innovative projects. Color-blind testing modes, accessibility guardrails in authoring, and keyboard-navigable data viz explorations (a million records in a table are not equivalent experience; sorry) are a few.

(And I’m finally working on getting my certifications done.)

Design Systems

I’ve been designing and developing white-labeled design systems for over 15 years. These are design systems that need to work for any company and any brand. And I’ve learned a few things.

Design systems bring consistency and cost savings. Good design systems look great and have buy-in and collaboration internally. Great design systems focus first on known use-cases, have an opinion, and drive change.

Over the last year, I’ve coordinated cross-functional groups to identify key component needs. I determined author-able settings; simplifying them and keeping them accessible. I’ve collaboratively compiled specs, design tokens, and processes with both developers and designers.

But the work doesn’t end with pixels. I’ve gotten buy-in from organizational stakeholders. I’ve kept stakeholders up-to-date on progress, written documentation and education courses, and guided and crafted Sketch library assets.

Over the last year, over 150 unique components were designed and entered the dev pipeline, with many of them ready to be used today.

Design Ops

Designers are a fascinating breed. Using new tooling, methods, and styles is part of the job. However, with each designer doing their own thing team unity, design quality, and organizational perception suffer. UX needs UX.

Over the last year, our org prioritized a new tech stack, design system, and accessibility. To make all this happen, I was given our company’s first-ever Design Ops role.

With all the diversity of workflow, I began with users; my co-workers. Through anonymous surveys, working sessions, and discussion we identified key needs. We created design file etiquette guidelines and understood what developers expected of us. We standardized cloud storage locations and resolved tooling issues that must be improved; critical to us during COVID. I worked (and still work) with managers to create design-team-centric documentation for onboarding new hires.

Outside our design team, there are many design teams within our org. I developed relationships with each, identifying shared software needs and coordinating deals with procurement to serve us all. This also allowed us to learn from each other for writing educational content. I’ve also been identifying “design teams of one” scattered throughout the organization to give them a design home in weekly discussions.

In short, I believe that design is a team sport.