My sweet spot is figuring out what a product should be and how to design it so it works well for the people using it and the business.
I don’t guess. I find out.
I dig past the surface to the questions that actually matter, come up with a lot of possible solutions, then test those with subject-matter experts and real users to find the one that’s right.
You can hire me for the research, the strategy, the design, or all of it.
Splunk develops software that allows IT professionals to search, monitor, and analyze machine-generated big data for various purposes.
OwnedUX design, usability research, use case training
Still running, seventeen years later
Still the core of the productThe search interface shipped in 4.0 and it’s still the centre of Splunk today.
Search Assistant is still in the productIt shipped in 4.0 and it’s still on by default.
The architecture heldThe app framework launched carrying about a dozen apps. It now carries nearly 500, most of them built by users, for things nobody scoped in 2008.
Splunk 4.0
This project was a complete redesign of the Splunk application to improve performance and reporting capabilities and to transform it from a tool into a software platform with a scalable App framework. For the redesign, I worked very closely with the Creative Director, Product Management, and Engineering to define the product scope and develop and evaluate designs.
Splunk 4.0, the main search interfaceThe Field Explorer
I spent a lot of time working with internal users and SMEs to identify the personas and use cases to ensure the framework and design would accommodate real-life workflows.
Search / Troubleshoot Problem Use Case
Splunk Manager
Splunk Manager, now called Settings in Splunk. These are wireframes from building it out, not the finished interface.
Configurations: Summary1 / 3
Search Assistant
While at Yahoo! I observed a number of usability studies conducted by the Search team. They were looking for ways to help users increase the accuracy of their search. While that project wasn’t viable for the general population, I saw the need for that kind of support in Splunk, since the search language was proprietary and had to be learned. I pitched the idea to provide help to users while searching (in addition to advanced typeahead, including examples, definitions, and other related suggested searches) and was able to work with our Chief Engineer to develop the concept and test it internally.
Search Assistant, expanded
Splunk now ships a separate GenAI assistant that turns plain English into SPL. Same problem, new tools, seventeen years on.
Building the UX function, and everything else
I hired and mentored a design intern to develop a UI taxonomy and standards. In addition to working on a complete redesign of Splunk and various other projects like Dashboards and an App Framework, I developed and delivered Use Case training to product managers and engineers, and conducted usability studies with internal users and customers and presented findings and proposed solutions to the team.
PAR Technology provides restaurants with point of sale, payments, and back office systems. Punchh, which PAR acquired in 2021, provides loyalty marketing software and a white-label mobile loyalty app. Customers include Taco Bell, Dairy Queen, and other fast food and fast casual chains.
OwnedUX design, research, product strategy
I was brought in to build a strategic UX function at Punchh. I built a team of UX designers, a visual designer, and a researcher, covering the most impactful areas of the product. After the acquisition I took on UX for PAR’s products as well, inheriting the two designers PAR had and bringing in consultants to cover the rest. I ultimately oversaw a team of twelve across the Punchh Loyalty Marketing Platform, the Punchh Mobile Loyalty & Ordering App Framework, Brink POS, PAR Payments and Services, and Data Central, PAR’s back office system.
The Unified Commerce Platform
The opportunity in the Punchh and PAR acquisition was bigger than integration. Integration would let the products pass data to each other. Unification meant one data model underneath all of them. That would let PAR build things no single product could do alone.
I led the effort to define and validate the strategy, and to get the Board to fund it. The question was which use cases were worth building, what customers would pay for them, and where PAR should invest first.
The Unified Commerce Platform vision, from the board deck I designed
Our CPTO brought in external consultants to run the market research. I directed their work, planned the research with them, and helped them run the sessions. We identified the candidate use cases, then met with Technology and Operations leaders at customers including Dairy Queen, Arby’s, and CAVA to walk through the use cases and rate their importance. We scoped the ones that mattered at several levels of depth and took those versions back to existing and new customers, to find out how far we’d have to go to solve each one properly. Then we surveyed 150+ Food & Beverage decisionmakers on what they were willing to pay for each use case.
The prioritized use casesOne use case scoped into three phases, and the questions we took back to customers
Results
The Board approved the strategy and funded the first phase at over $100,000
The strategy was detailed enough to act on, and became the foundation for prioritizing key projects across the org
Punchh Campaign Workflow
Marketers at restaurant brands use the Punchh Loyalty Marketing Platform to run their loyalty program: the offers and rewards their customers see in the app, the campaigns that bring people back, and the reporting on how it all performs.
Years of adding functionality for one customer after another had left the workflow sprawling. You had to know what kind of campaign you wanted before you could start building one, and it took several steps to get started. The steps didn’t match how marketers think about a campaign, and the settings weren’t grouped in any way that showed which ones related to which. Marketers couldn’t tell what to do, and Punchh covered the gap with training and support.
Campaign settings, before the redesign
Our only designer left as the work started, so I led the redesign myself until I could hire. I interviewed the Director of Training and the Director of Customer Success, because they spent more time with marketers than anyone else at Punchh and knew where the workflow was breaking down. From there I developed the marketer user journey, the use cases, and the task flow that broke the campaign apart into who, what, and when.
I ran the journey as a working session with the whole team, product, engineering, training, and customer success, to socialize the work and to pull in what people knew and had never written down. Then I validated the journey and the task flow with customers. We tested with customers as we designed. As I hired, designers took over the design and saw it through to release.
The marketer user journeyThe task flow that broke the campaign into who, what, and when
Merlin, our AI capability, was the recommendation branch at every decision in the flow, and the plan was to upsell it to existing customers. Pilot testing made clear the recommendations weren’t good enough to sell. I raised that we should cancel it, and we did.
The campaign list1 / 3
Results
Increased customer engagement and satisfaction: CSAT 4+
Lowered training and support costs by 4–6 hours per user
No drop in usage for existing workflow features
Punchh Mobile Loyalty App
Punchh sold restaurant brands a white-label loyalty and ordering app. Smaller brands ran on it and larger ones paid agencies to build their own, integrating Punchh through APIs. The framework underneath the app was real: standards and shared functionality. The design on top of it was custom every time.
We rebuilt the app framework as a true white-label app, good enough that a brand who could afford an agency would want ours anyway. Every element was a component, and every component came in more than one layout. Brand styling changed the visual treatment on top of that. With minimum components and maximum flexibility, each brand could fully express itself.
Ordering screens from the framework, unstyledBrand explorations for demonstration purposes only, neither app was built
Best in class was the bar, so I staffed for it and brought in a visual design consultant alongside a UX designer and a researcher. I coached the team, including our product manager and director of product, through developing the use cases so the design would cover what any brand and any of their guests would need. The designs were usability tested and came back intuitive and effective.
By the time I left, the framework was in detailed design, the approach was settled, and the team was running on it.
While not working directly for companies, I’ve led the UX strategy and design of multiple consumer and enterprise applications as a UX Consultant. I use my expertise in the areas of design management, design innovation, product strategy, use case development and training, requirements definition, interaction design, visual design, user research, and the trade-offs required between all areas to create successful, engaging products.
ProcessMaker
2019
ProcessMaker enables Digital Transformation by allowing companies to create and manage their own business processes. I was asked to help with a complete redesign of their application. I worked closely with the CEO and Product Managers to identify the personas and develop the strategy to focus on the consumer experience for the product.
The designs were validated by the product team and internal Subject Matter Experts. I provided guidance to their Visual Designer to create the final look and feel of the product.
User Personas
Final comps shown as scenario
Create request1 / 10
Carnegie Mellon University + ForAllSecure
2017
Carnegie Mellon University CyLab Director founded ForAllSecure (now Mayhem Security, acquired by Bugcrowd in 2025) with the mission to make the world’s critical software safe. The company applied its patented technology from over a decade of CMU research to solving the difficult challenge of making software safer. I was brought on board to work on HackCenter, a training platform designed to teach anyone the actionable skills needed to be effective in cybersecurity.
I worked directly with the CEO and founder, COO, and Lead Engineers to design the UX for HackCenter from concept generation to wireframes, to final visual design and assets.
All competitions1 / 3
Results
Designed and launched Hack Center in a couple of months
Supported competitions with over 500 participants
Extended to support multiple competitions
FatWallet
2016
FatWallet was a deal site (shut down in 2017 while part of Ebates/Rakuten) that was primarily based on its highly active user forum. I was brought on board to develop a UX strategy to increase the adoption and retention of all deal seekers, not just the more hard-core forum users. To start, I worked with the Director of Product to develop User Personas and validated them with various users via interviews.
User Personas
While developing concepts for a future version of the site I worked on a number of short-term initiatives. I created a few successful promotional campaigns to drive users to specific customer sites, hired and onboarded a Senior UX Designer in MN for the team, and redesigned a few highly used elements of their site including the Deal tiles and Store page. We conducted a couple of bucket tests for the Store page to identify the highest performing layout (horizontal).
Original design1 / 3
Results
4% increase in conversions, far exceeding our initial goals
While at Feedzai, I expanded the team from 2 to 4 UX Designers, 2 UX Researchers, and 1 Product Marketing Designer. Alongside hiring and training, I focused on socializing and implementing a discovery-driven process that ensured cross-functional alignment and enabled the UX team to concentrate on the work with the highest impact on product and company success.
Building the team
I led a number of activities to attract top-level talent to Feedzai. I created a hiring campaign shared across LinkedIn and Facebook, hosted and presented at a couple of local UX Meetups, and worked with my team to create a humorous video illustrating the benefits of doing UX at Feedzai.
The UX recruiting section of the Feedzai websiteThe hiring campaign adLisbon UX design community appearances by the Feedzai team
Enabling UX impact
Feedzai had a strong Agile Engineering group when I joined, but the product organization was less mature, and designs were often produced “just in time” for grooming sessions with Engineering. I worked closely with my team and peers to develop a discovery-driven framework so UX research and design could run ahead of development sprints.
More importantly, each project began with a kick-off where each lead (UX, PM, Eng) agreed on the project goals, success metrics, and the activities and scope across discovery, definition, and design.
Strategic Product Definition & Design ProcessVision for Integrating Genome (Fraud Visualization) into Fraud Alert Manager
Results
The new discovery process replaced just-in-time design: research and design ran ahead of development sprints
Piloted with one team, then adopted by others: at least three sprint teams running the process
Understanding our users
At Feedzai, there was a strong appetite to develop a deep understanding of our users, their motivations, and their workflows. In addition to working on roadmap features, I led an initiative for the Research and Design team to develop and validate User Personas and User Journeys, ensuring the design and development effort stayed focused on solving the right problems. This comprehensive research was conducted with two very different groups of users.
Data Scientists: Build and review the performance of machine learning models to evaluate and score transactions for risk.
Fraud Analysts: Manually review and investigate risky transactions to identify and mitigate fraud.
Lattice Engines (acquired by Dun & Bradstreet in 2019) used Machine Learning Models and data from various sources to score leads, prospects, and other sales and marketing opportunities to allow Sales and Marketing professionals to focus on the highest impact efforts.
OwnedUX design, agency design team
I led the design of our suite of applications and managed an Interaction Designer, Visual Designer, and Prototyper through a design agency.
Predictive Lead Scoring
I led the effort to define and design the first customer-facing version of our Lead Scoring product. The goals of the project were to:
Wow potential customers
Demonstrate the value-add and credibility of predictive analytics
Show leading-edge visualization(s)
Provide useful customer data insights (if possible)
I worked closely with the Product Manager and coordinated ongoing feedback sessions with internal users and customers to define the requirements and scope of the project, iterate on design concepts, and ensure the application would be easy to use.
Once the design was more solid I worked with Engineering to finalize the UI and ensure it could be easily implemented.
Predictive Lead Scoring UX: Model attributesPredictive Lead Scoring UX: Model performancePredictive Lead Scoring UX: Model creation and implementation workflowPredictive Lead Scoring UX: User personas
Results
Average Selling Price increased 3x after release
50 active Customers within 3 months
Model Readout workload decreased by 75%
SalesPrism
SalesPrism provided Sales professionals with recommendations to cross-sell, up-sell, and prospect more effectively based on Machine Learning predictions. These recommendations appeared in their CRM (Salesforce) and provided the user with the rationale and talking points for making the sale.
I worked directly with a few customers to get feedback on designs throughout the project to ensure they would be easy to understand and use. The design was successfully implemented to be responsive to support desktop and mobile use.
SalesPrism Recommendations, MobileSalesPrism Recommendations, Salesforce Web
InsideView provides data about companies and people to help Sales professionals engage with prospects and customers.
OwnedUX, front-end engineering, technical writing
At InsideView, I had the opportunity to build a team including a UX Manager, 2 UX Designers, and a Technical Writer, in addition to leading our team of 6 UI Engineers. I developed a UX roadmap and customer-first culture, where design sprints ran two cycles ahead of development.
InsideView Redesign
While at InsideView I championed a visual redesign to improve the overall user experience as well as minimize development effort. Senthil, our Visual Designer, led the design of a new design system. He worked closely with our front-end engineering lead to create a library of pixel-perfect reusable components, important because most users viewed the UI within their CRM, and the InsideView module was restricted to a height of 400-px.
InsideView module within Salesforce / CRM
Company details1 / 3Activity Stream in Standalone product
Mobile
I oversaw the design and development of InsideView’s first mobile app, focused on giving Field Sales representatives relevant insights, data, and conversation starters about companies and people when and where they needed it. The primary goal of the project was to create buzz around a mobile app and explore the possibilities of this medium. The end product was well received internally, though the product was not officially released since the use cases solved for Field Sales representatives who were not our core users.
Dhayan, our UX Manager in India was the lead designer and developed use cases, identified high-level requirements, created multiple iterations of concepts, and the final, detailed design. Throughout the process I helped clarify use cases, and gave feedback on the design. The design helped InsideView win a few deals, because it showed prospects we could be mobile.
