About me
CURRENTLY:
Principal UX Designer at Amazon, leading multiple cross-cutting merchant, shopper and developer experiences.
GENERAL ME:
I'm a design leader excited about new & nebulous spaces, voice & conversational user experiences, hardware design, cars, gaming, horology, sustainable energy, AI, VR and (especially) AR.
Experience as an individual contributor, creative people manager, strategic organizational leader.
PREVIOUSLY:
I was a member of product design leadership at Spotify. My team worked on ads and promotional experiences, shipping a bunch of bold new multimodal products and experiments. Survived an IPO, learned a lot about the music and ads industry, managed multiple teams, and generally took quite a lot away from my six years there.
Prior to Spotify, I was at Vox Media in its infancy. I started at Vox when we were 30 developers, designers, product managers and sports writers awkwardly people piled into a townhouse in DC, hired to lead the product design for Polygon.com. As the company continued to grow into the powerhouse it is today, I led the responsive redesign of The Verge, ran the in-house advertising design team, and ended my tenure as the Product Design Director for ad experiences and tools.
Even fuuuuuurther back, I was an interaction designer at Pappas (a DC-based digital agency working on clients like Audi, Discovery, Syfy and Hilton) and at Discovery Communications (Discovery Channel, Science Channel, Animal Planet, etc.)
I graduated from VCU Arts' Graphic Design program.
NEXT:
Always thinking about the next move. Reach out.
Work experience
Portfolio narrative available upon request
Amazon
Principal UX Designer (L7) August 2021 – Present. New York City
Currently focused on Buy with Prime. First hire for the NYC team. Stay tuned for more.
Spotify
Senior Product Design Manager April 2017 – July 2021 New York City
My time is split fairly evenly between product area strategy, people management, and facilitating my team’s design execution. I’m currently managing six product designers at various stages of their careers.
We work on the holistic Spotify Free ad experience across all of our clients, surfaces and partner platforms. Recognizing that our ad experience simply isn’t tailored for the reality of a backgrounded app – where 80% of the time there’s no visual UI – we seek to provide users with control over their experience (skippable ads, ad feedback), which provides signals we can use to improve relevancy (targeting, timing, contextual adaptiveness), and then foster more engagement (voice interfaces, audio ad leave behinds, discovery and task-based flows and surfaces).
Sitting atop all the work that we do are some key considerations – we respect the platform, the features, the spaces that we play in. We build bridges with other teams, foster understanding and craft mutually-empathetic principles. We work in tandem to extend existing patterns in thoughtful and intelligent ways that push our entire design system forward, so we’re not reinventing the wheel or expecting users to learn new patterns just for ads and promotions.
We seriously consider the ethical side of everything we do. How do we do right by our users, building and maintaining their trust as we improve relevancy and create new interaction models that sidestep the situational and contextual barriers that currently inhibit interactions?
Senior Product Designer November 2015 – April 2017 New York City
Senior design individual contributor working on the Spotify Free experience.
Vox Media
Product Design Director January 2015 – November 2015 New York City
I worked to ensure that product design had a significant voice in all revenue discussions. Our team oversaw and iterated upon the UX and visual design of in-house ad products, performance dashboards, ad creation/publishing tools, and Chorus for Advertisers – our editorial platform for brand storytelling. Managed a growing team of mid-level product and front-end designers.
Principal Product Designer January 2015 – November 2015 New York City
Led design for our in-house ad agency. Managed the workload of a team of five designers working on day-to-day RFP response, campaign production design, and new ad product development.
Lead Product Designer, The Verge December 2012 – March 2014 Washington, DC / New York City
Worked with editorial and product to evolve Vox Media's acclaim technology culture vertical.
Lead Product Designer, Polygon December 2012 – March 2014 Washington, DC
Led a team of super talented product designers through the groundbreaking launch of Polygon. Managed the workload of a team of four designers across various career stages.
Pappas
Interaction Designer February 2010 – May 2012 New York City
Worked on digital projects spanning numerous clients including Audi, Blackboard, .CO Internet SAS, DoubleTree by Hilton, Geico, NBC Universal, Network Solutions, Neustar, Rosetta Stone, and Volkswagen. Given opportunities to explore numerous roles ranging from design, development, UX and art direction.
Discovery Communications
Interaction Designer March 2009 – February 2010 Washington, DC
Worked on digital projects for many of Discovery's worldwide brands including Animal Planet, Planet Green, Science Channel, and TLC.
Education
VCUarts
BFA, Graphic Design
Graduated May 2008, Cum Laude
Richmond, VA
Speaking and publications
Meeting Listeners Where They Are: Designing for Spotify’s Audio-Forward User Experience
February 2, 2020 Spotify.Design Blog
Spotify’s experience isn't defined or constrained by the bounds of a smartphone screen, and neither are our design and user research practices. Check out this post I co-wrote with some key members of my team that dives into our unique design process.
September 2, 2014 The Verge
“Say hello to our new, fully responsive website.”
Polygon.com Design Process @ Valio Con 2013
June 2013 Valio Con
Recording of our team's panel discussion on the Polygon.com launch at Valio Con 2013.