About

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Background

I design meaningful and memorable experiences–online and on ground. I have over a decade of experience in design and web development. I’ve been designing with Adobe® products since 2006 and developing websites on WordPress–and with other CMSs and frameworks–since 2007. In my spare time, I’m broadening my skillsets in UX and humanity-centered design with Interaction Design Foundation, Nielsen Norman Group, and various courses on LinkedIn Learning and Udemy. I’m becoming a collector of certifications, too, as to keep up with Artificial Intelligence, Angular, React, Data Analytics & Visualization, and the Microsoft ecosystem.

Why “Experience Designer?”

As an experience designer I am a generalist versed in research, design, and development for physical and digital products. In the past I referred to myself as a Unicorn Experience Designer. I removed “unicorn” from it. Why?

1. After reading this post by Christopher Nguyen, I reasoned unicorn is a self-praising word. That’s not humble.
2. Everyone can do at least a little coding for websites these days. I’m not special in that regard.
3. Everyone brings additional skills from another domain. I just bring my domains to the problem and solution spaces.

Why did I use "unicorn" in the first place?

It was 2011 when heard the term unicorn in a design and development context. That was also my first year in grad school at SCAD’s Design Management program. I was having coffee with Dustin Larimer and R Campbell when we were discussing previous projects. After talking about mine, Dustin looked at me wide-eyed and said,

“Oh, you’re a unicorn.”

After some digging, I found IDF defines this as

“…[Someone] who possesses not only the usual set of skills required for a role, but also additional skills in another domain… A UX unicorn typically refers to a UX designer who’s proficient in design and front-end development.”

✔ That’s me. I’ve done those things here.

Experience designers (also known as UX Designers) are…

“Generalists performing tasks along all design thinking phases.”

✔ That’s me, too; I’ve contributed to each phase in design and development cycles. My career thus far has entailed:

• Focusing on peoples’ needs through leading and conducting user experience research.
• Leading agile design and development sprints for web apps, marketing campaigns, and analytics dashboards.
• Synthesizing qualitative and quantitative data for guiding digital products and programs.
• Facilitating creative and design thinking workshops for design teams and executives.
• Writing design and creative briefs and project requirements for design and development teams.
• Adapting and iterating on evidence-based user personas and customer journey maps.
• Maintaining ecommerce stores and implementing progressive enhancements for loyal and prospective customers.
• Designing and implementing plugins on WordPress websites.
• Collecting and leveraging the attitudinal and behavioral datasets for iterative design.
• Working closely with identity and design systems for brands large and small.

What’s it like to work with me?

Temperament (MBS)

One of my favorite examinations for temperament is the Management By Strengths (MBS). After looking through the descriptions, it’s pretty accurate to my communication and management styles. I’m Paced!

Description of Strengths

• Harmony-oriented, cooperative, friendly, and easy-going
• Conscientious in making decisions and persistent in gathering the necessary facts
• Methodical, making every move count
• Have a long fuse and tend to hold things within
• Thorough and a good planner; don’t like being rushed at the last minute
• Naturally good listener and have a good memory
• Loyal and stable
• Appreciate time to adjust to changes

High Trait: Pace

The blue color code represents the Pace trait. As a paced person, I’m naturally cooperative, considerate, and easy going. Though I deal with it well, as a Paced person, I frown upon being rushed at the last minute. So, it’s best that people get with me early and agree as to when something needs to be accomplished. This result surprised me, as having gone through design school and startup culture, I am accustomed to rushed deadlines and collaborative cramming. Not that I like it, but I can do it without complaint.

Communication by Strengths

I appreciate people who are candid, to the point, and give me the time to think and evaluate the facts concerning change.

Motivation by Strengths

• D Below the Line (-9) : non-intimidating style
• E Below the Line (-21) : privacy
• P Above the Line (21) : harmony, cooperation, timing
• S Above the Line (10) : justice, specific praise, constancy

Results of Self Evaluation Survey

In 2020 I asked colleagues and previous collaborators what it’s like to work with me. After synthesizing the data, here are the results. Categorized by how others observe my thinking, feelings, and actions:

	Cognitive (Thoughts)
Insatiably Curious	Unceasingly Reflective	Habitually Systematic

	Emotive (Feelings)
Shamelessly Humble	Steadily Composed	Selectively Contagious

	Active (Actions)
Selflessly Dedicated	Excitedly Collaborative	Perpetually Refining

Some of these observed qualities were probably due to my reading Ryan Holiday’s work on stoicism and Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

Champion Empathy

Empathy for people underpins my processes. Listening to, participating with, and observing people in context elicit wisdom and empathy while aiding identification of root problems. Identifying root problems are key, because there’s nothing worse than solving for the wrong problem. Deciding what to do should always be predicated on data gathered from empathetic means, and carried forward from those premises.

Celebrate Tiny Wins

I know what it’s like to navigate turbulent work environments. I know the impact that vagueness, chaos, complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty pose to well-being. I also know that it’s imperative we maintain healthy habits of mind amid turbulent conditions. Mature coping mechanisms of humor, sublimation, and gratitude help people (and myself) through these times. Celebrating the tiny wins is an effort to highlight successes no matter how small they are in the broad scheme of things. And in truth, the tiny wins are what contribute to an organization’s overall success. Allocating time and attention to tiny wins helps a team nurture resilience and camaraderie.

Personal Manifesto (long-form)

Don’t try to be the original; just try to be good. Although I’m a designer and developer in the sense of producing web and mobile applications, and their visual elements used to elicit actions, there is a deeper definition that permeates everything I do. This deeper definition incorporates designing for emotion and reason, sustainable (human) systems, multiple alternative futures, and the empowerment of all stakeholders and cultures involved. As a designer in the 21st Century, I acknowledge my role as a steward for humanity and our biological ecosystems as a whole–empowering people to co-design for emergence under pressing problems they courageously face. To do this, I use a variety of methods to foster design thinking and systems-thinking in our white water world.

Read Long Form Manifesto:

Design with people. Designing in-solo and in-silo limits our efficacy. Designing by committee limits our vision. Designing with a client as if they’re over our shoulder is annoying. Designing with people means involving people intimate to the problem space and solution space; maintaining their involvement through the projects’ lifecycles.

Good design is iterative. It’s a process of continuous prototyping, testing, and feedback. A good process is one that allows the things to evolve alongside evolving attitudes and behaviors–minding ethics and humanity’s progress toward a future of sustainable things.

Prefer the verb form of design thinking. It’s about designing how people think, and understanding them in their context. It contains a large swath of methods enabling them to solve and/or mitigate their most pressing problem spaces. It’s about engendering creative and critical capacities in groups of people. Most of all, it involves nurturing deep relationships with people involved with the problem spaces.

Use systems thinking and its underlying philosophy to understand problem spaces and evaluate solution spaces. It’s about being cognizant of future trajectories of complex environments. Most of all, it’s about thinking holistically about the people and forces involved.

I subscribe to precepts of the Ulm model of design, where design is process and analysis involving semiotics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, economics, material science, and above all, social responsibility. I consider most–usually all–of these dimensions when engaged in a design process.

Research isn’t just surveys. What people write in surveys is not always what they do or feel in reality. It’s often better to observe people in their context. This is why ethnography is crucial to fostering a deep understanding of people.

Use story as a tool. It is used to communicate the depth of our empathy with those we’re designing for. It ignites and maintains interest, uniting people in a cause. Moreover, it leverages qualitative and quantitative aspects of people in society.

Don’t be a helicopter consultant who drops in just to perform audits and tell people how to solve their problem(s), then abruptly leave the context. I’ll find experts when their input is needed, but solutions are best conceived and implemented by the people affected by the problem(s). My involvement is co-designing and empowering the community by contributing artifacts that serve as stepping stones to desired and hitherto unrealized states. It’s about supporting culture, while adding a little to it.

Don’t step on other people to get ahead. I’ve observed stressful team dynamics involving in layoffs and forcing people to make tough decisions. And I know why these things happened (budgets and markets are merciless). Tension and competition within teams can be handled in healthy ways, such that it doesn’t come at the cost of collective happiness and fulfillment. Candor, camaraderie, and compromise are essential when operating under conditions of uncertainty. Moreover, teams must not let infighting distract from the people we’re designing for.

Don’t complain. Complaining affects everyone involved. I insist on proactive habits of mind when issues are discovered. Design imparts healthy coping mechanisms through sublimation, anticipation, humour, and altruism. In another sense, complaining is reactive. But design process is proactive.

Assume the good in people. We all have tough times we’re going through. And we all have different ways we cope with these things. Assuming the good in people eases early frustrations in communication.

Respect the ethical dimension to design and to my design practice, in that every artifact and idea I help introduce to a system will invariably create behaviors and attitudes upon which I must critically reflect. Therefore, artifacts must be subject to, and have capacity for, careful iteration, modulation, convalescence, and in cases warranting, complete withdrawal of their availability.

Remember design is inherently political. Just as we negotiate form and function of an artifact, the policy discussions preceding and guiding an artifact are the result of complex sociopolitical, socioeconomic, and sociotechnical negotiations. Therefore, process, and perception therof, must respect the nature of these complex relationships in order to give due credit, build community, and aid diffusion.

There is a difference between innovation and invention. Where an invention can be a novel and elegant solution to a problem space, it will not become an innovation until it successfully diffuses within populations that need it.

Be sensitive to beliefs and how they’re formed. Beliefs manifest as statements about the world, and when we dig deeper, we find they are part of a structure of subsequent beliefs and convictions about what is observed in the physical world. We trust that our observations, and statements made about them, are well-founded. But as humans, we are prone to fallibility. We are prone to cognitive biases and logical fallacies–formal and informal. That said, not all beliefs are well-founded. Believing the world is a flat disc, for instance, is not a well-founded belief. Debates entertaining that position are a waste of time and resources.

Be sensitive to language–spoken and written. All speech acts have purpose(s). As a proponent of pragma-dialectics, I treat everyday spoken language as objects that move people to formulate beliefs and perform actions. From vision statements to planning and task execution, I pay close attention to the language we use when prototyping future states. Some of the planning techniques I use render collaborative argumentation for facilitating creativity, lateral thinking, and critical thinking–all for fostering shared understanding.

Stay curious about people, places, and things. And I tend to assume others do, too. Learning new things and meeting people with their own, unique stories makes life more vibrant and exciting. The little tidbits of information, although seemingly unrelated or tangential, can greatly influence strategic (re)framing and outcomes. That’s why I like to retain and communicate facts about the world. Spreading knowledge is like handing out gifts.

Sources and Inspiration

Pendleton-Jullian, A. M., & Brown, J. S. (2018). Design unbound vol. 1. designing for emergence in a white water world (Vol. 1). The MIT Press.

Pendleton-Jullian, A. M., & Brown, J. S. (2018). Design unbound vol. 2. designing for emergence in a white water world (Vol. 2). The MIT Press.

Protzen, J.-P., Harris, D. J., & Rittel, H. (2010). The Universe of Design: Horst Rittel’s theories of design and planning. Routledge.

21st Century Design with Don Norman. Interaction Design Foundation.

Hardy, Tom. (2010). INNOVATION and CHAOS. Design Management Journal (Former Series). 5. 35 - 39. 10.1111/j.1948-7169.1994.tb00399.x.

Norman, Donald A. (2013). The design of everyday things (Revised and expanded editions ed.). Cambridge, MA London: The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-52567-1.

Risdon, Chris & Quattlebaum, Patrick. Orchestrating Experiences: Collaborative Design for Complexity. Rosenfeld Media, 2018.

Hardy, Tom & Chung, Kook & So, Shin. (2010). Strategic Realization: Building Fundamental Design Values. Design Management Journal (Former Series). 11. 65 - 69. 10.1111/j.1948-7169.2000.tb00289.x.

Rogers, Everett M. Diffusion of Innovations: 5th Ed. Free Press, 2003.

Culmsee, Paul, and Kailash Awati. Heretic’s Guide to Best Practices: The Reality of Managing Complex Problems in Organisations. iUniverse, 2013.

Eemeren, Frans H. Van, and R. Grootendorst. A Systematic Theory of Argumentation: The Pragma-Dialectical Approach. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Walton, Douglas. Informal Logic a Pragmatic Approach. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Martin, Roger L. The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the next Competitive Advantage. Harvard Business Press, 2009.

Senge, Peter, et al. The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organisations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World. Nicholas Brealey Pub, 2011.

Thomas, David Dylan, and Yasmine Mustafa. Design for Cognitive Bias. Jeffrey Zeldman / A Book Apart, 2020.

Monteiro, Mike. Design Is a Job. A Book Apart, 2022.

Conklin, E. Jeffrey. Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems. Wiley, 2006.

Erika Hall. Conversational Design. A Book Apart, 2018.

Hall, Erika, and Kio Stark. Just Enough Research. 2nd ed., A Book Apart, 2019.

Shedroff, Nathan. Design Is the Problem. Rosenfeld Media, 2011.

Education

Bachelor of Science in Visual Communication Technology, Bowling Green State University, 2010.

Masters of Fine Arts (unfinished), Savannah College of Art and Design, 2011-2016. Earned 95 of 100 credits towards the MFA.

Certifications

As I mentioned in my background, I’ve become a bit of collector with certifications. Upskilling and staying updated on current trends across my tech stacks are important to me.

See All Certifications