As UX Lead at Concentrix Catalyst, I designed and delivered a comprehensive UX audit of the Midas mobile experience. I created the end-to-end evaluation framework, including custom thematic heuristics and a scoring rubric, to assess key user flows such as homepage navigation, store locator, tire shopping, appointment scheduling, and coupon redemption. The audit applied structured criteria focused on clarity, efficiency, responsiveness, accessibility, and content hierarchy to identify usability issues and areas for improvement.

I presented findings through annotated screenshots and visual benchmarks that translated complex evaluations into clear, actionable insights. The deliverables combined scoring logic with prioritized recommendations, helping stakeholders quickly grasp what needed attention and how to proceed. Mobile accessibility and analytics insights were integrated to strengthen the business case for design enhancements.

What set this audit apart was its value beyond design. It became a powerful sales enablement tool. The clarity and depth of the evaluation allowed Catalyst leadership to showcase the work in future proposals and reuse the model across accounts. Most significantly, the audit helped generate direct business results. Within months, the client signed three new engagements, including two win-back projects and one to implement the UX recommendations. As leadership noted, the audit’s structure and storytelling helped position UX as both a design catalyst and a driver of business growth.

Reflections: This project reinforced how well-structured UX evaluations can extend beyond design critique to become persuasive business assets. By grounding the audit in clear scoring methods, evidence-based insights, and visual storytelling, the work supported both internal strategy and external client acquisition. The experience continues to shape how I approach UX evaluations, especially in enterprise and service environments where clarity, credibility, and scalability are essential. It also informs my current interest in intelligent systems design, where structured evaluation frameworks can support adaptive recommendations and human-AI alignment across user experiences.

To help a client understand why they were losing customers to competitors, I led the creation of a strategic journey map that traced the end-to-end experience of an online event platform buyer. This was not a generic exercise. It was designed to surface actionable insights tied to real business outcomes. I partnered with the sales team to interview five client representatives over a two-week period, gathering data about buyer behavior, unmet expectations, and friction points across each phase of the decision process.

The raw input was structured using an intake framework, then synthesized into a comprehensive journey map. The map highlighted breakdowns in communication, content clarity, legal alignment, and internal ownership. I facilitated a working session with internal stakeholders to translate these friction points into team-specific actions. These became the foundation for measurable KPIs, such as reducing contract cycle time, improving RFP response quality, and providing clearer terms during procurement.

This effort helped align sales, marketing, and product teams around a shared understanding of customer needs and internal gaps. The journey map became a strategic reference for go-to-market planning and lead nurturing, and I was invited to continue contributing in sales planning meetings. The work delivered both diagnostic clarity and operational alignment.

Reflections: This project reinforced how meaningful experience design must connect the dots between human insight and organizational accountability. As I move toward designing Human-AI experiences, I carry forward the principle that great systems require shared understanding, clear ownership, and measurable outcomes. This journey map demonstrated that aligning internal teams with the external customer journey is foundational for building intelligent, adaptive, and ethical systems.

1. Benchmark Personas: The client approached me with a challenge: they were designing a new online events product and wanted to know if existing personas, published by a market leader in their space, were valid for their user base. These reference personas, developed by Bizzabo, grouped attendees according to their event purpose: learning, networking, or fun. While structured and easy to reference, the Bizzabo personas were largely role-based and did not fully capture how attendees actually used virtual event platforms. My assignment was to analyze user data and determine whether these reference personas could be validated. If not, what new personas would emerge from the data, and how were they behaviorally distinct?



2. Research Scope and Ethnographic Coding: The client had conducted 10 interviews with target user groups that included students, marketers, and event planners. I received transcripts and was asked to analyze the raw data to determine persona structure. I used ethnographic methods that go beyond simple interview summaries. Open coding allowed me to surface key patterns, axial coding helped connect themes across participants, and selective coding clarified which behaviors were most dominant. This methodical approach introduced academic-level rigor and grounded the findings in behavior, not assumptions. It also established a credible foundation that design and product teams could trust.



3. Emergence of Behavior-Based Personas: Two behaviorally distinct personas emerged from the analysis: the Teleporter and the Immerser. The Teleporter is someone who needs to be in multiple places at once and attends virtual events for efficiency and convenience. The Immerser is someone who values focus and minimal distractions and prefers clean, content-first interfaces. These personas were mutually exclusive in their mode of engagement. Unlike the Bizzabo personas which often had overlapping behaviors, these personas made clear distinctions based on how people interacted with technology. They captured intent, cognitive load, and user priorities, offering a much sharper lens for product teams.



4. Mapping Behaviors, Not Roles: I mapped each user’s quotes and behaviors to the personas, validating them with real-life examples. Teleporters preferred flexibility and multitasking, often tuning in while managing other obligations. Immersers dismissed features like avatars and 3D interfaces as unnecessary and preferred sessions that allowed for deep focus. When mapped back to the Bizzabo framework, it became clear that while some alignment existed, the Bizzabo personas lacked the behavioral clarity needed to drive feature design. The personas I developed provided a stronger link between behavioral insight and design actionability.



5. Why These Personas Matter: Bizzabo's personas were designed for communication and marketing alignment, but they fell short when it came to informing platform design decisions. The personas I created were not only grounded in behavior but also mapped cleanly to feature-level requirements. For example, knowing whether a user is a Teleporter or an Immerser helps prioritize asynchronous access, content navigation, UI design, and social features. These insights moved the persona framework from a static reference to a living tool that could directly influence product strategy and design choices. This enabled the team to differentiate their product based on actual user interaction styles, not general roles.



6. The Teleporter and the Immerser: The final deliverables presented two detailed personas rooted in behavioral insights rather than abstract roles. Each persona was defined not only by their preferences but also by the distinct technological needs and mental models they brought to the virtual event experience. The Teleporter was motivated by flexibility and efficiency, often multitasking or moving quickly between sessions. The Immerser, in contrast, preferred singular focus and minimal distractions, with strong preferences for flat interfaces and clear content delivery. Because these personas aligned cleanly with specific UX and platform design considerations, they enabled the product team to prioritize features in a way that directly supported differentiated user needs. This work helped the client shift from a one-size-fits-all product approach to a behavior-driven experience strategy.



Reflections: This project shaped my current focus on Human-AI experiences by highlighting how people assign agency to digital tools. Both the Teleporter and the Immerser reflect different thresholds of cognitive load, control, and social tolerance. These distinctions are essential when designing systems where AI plays an assistive or adaptive role. Human-AI interfaces must be context-aware. An Immerser may want AI to remove distractions, while a Teleporter may want it to optimize multitasking. This case taught me that building meaningful AI-infused experiences starts with a clear, grounded understanding of user behavior, not assumptions based on broad personas. This learning continues to inform how I approach the experience design of intelligent systems today.

As a Senior UX Consultant at Concentrix, I led the user experience strategy for a large-scale content migration project, consolidating over 150 hospital websites under the CommonSpirit Health network into Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). Following a series of hospital acquisitions in the late 2010s and early 2020s, each site had its own CMS and localized structure, resulting in fragmented user experiences.

While visual design and a centralized design system were already in place, the team faced challenges standardizing navigation and aligning legacy structures with AEM-compatible components. My role focused on auditing the information architecture across these websites, with a deep dive into campaign landing pages, to develop a scalable and unified IA strategy.

I created detailed governance models that mapped content usage to specific AEM components, enabling consistent page structures and reusable patterns across all sites. This work resolved key blockers in the migration process and laid the foundation for a cohesive and user-centered digital ecosystem across the CommonSpirit portfolio.

In my role at Concentrix Catalyst, I led a comparative heuristic evaluation project for ADP, a global leader in payroll and human capital management. The objective was to assess the usability and interface enhancements made between ADP’s legacy 2019 system and its redesigned 2022 system. The client had undertaken substantial UI and workflow changes, and they needed a structured UX evaluation to benchmark progress and identify any remaining usability gaps.

I led a team of three UX professionals through a rigorous heuristic analysis process. This included refining the evaluation criteria to align with both Nielsen’s heuristics and client-specific UX goals. We conducted a deep dive into interaction patterns, visual hierarchy, error prevention strategies, and information architecture. I personally synthesized our findings into a results framework that highlighted both qualitative insights and actionable recommendations. The visual storytelling and clarity of the output became a hallmark of this project.

Unlike many heuristic evaluations done in pre-sales contexts, this effort was a fully scoped, priced, and delivered UX service engagement to establish experience standards. Its impact extended beyond ADP, setting a new standard internally for how Concentrix Catalyst approached evaluative UX work. Our deliverables were later referenced to shape similar evaluation offerings across other accounts, demonstrating the depth and strategic value of a well-executed heuristic audit.

1. Introducing the Product Context: SUMMIT

SUMMIT is Virginia Tech’s internal electronic grant proposal and award management system. Developed by the Office of Sponsored Research, it helps researchers submit funding proposals and enables administrative staff to manage post-award activities. While the product benefited from a strong internal development culture and a transition to modern technologies like React, its user experience needed significant improvement. Key users including Pre-Award Associates, Principal Investigators, and Approvers faced friction in navigating critical tasks under time pressure.



2. Design Process: Iterating Through Agile Sprints

The design process unfolded over multiple Agile sprints and involved collaborative whiteboarding, wireframing, and structured handoffs via JIRA. Early on, I translated sprint requirements into UX artifacts such as hand-sketched flows and mid-fidelity wireframes. These iterations surfaced early warning signs that best practice heuristics alone were insufficient to address deeper UX issues. It became clear that a more layered approach was needed to uncover gaps in user flow and task alignment.



3. Expert Evaluation: The UX Inflection Point

My formal engagement began with a structured expert evaluation. Using established heuristics, I assessed dashboards, forms, and metadata panels for usability flaws. The audit surfaced cognitive overload, unclear defaults, inconsistent feedback, and a lack of task orientation. These findings helped create a shared language among developers, product owners, and UX contributors, and shifted UX from a supportive role to a strategic lever within the product team.



4. Supporting Transition: Intermediate UX Gains

Based on the expert evaluation, the team implemented transitional improvements such as a decluttered interface, clearer indicators, and streamlined navigation. These changes enhanced usability but did not fully resolve core workflow challenges. Field observations showed persistent issues with search, data access, and task tracking, revealing that surface-level usability fixes were not enough to meet user expectations or behavioral needs.



5. Ethnographic Research: Understanding the Users

To go deeper, I conducted ethnographic research across multiple user groups, including Pre-Award staff, PIs, and Approvers. Through shadowing and contextual interviews, I uncovered pain points such as screen fatigue, inefficient search workflows, and manual tracking dependencies. These insights added emotional and procedural depth to the project, giving the team a richer understanding of what made the experience frustrating or unintuitive.



6. Dramatic Change: A System Reimagined

The final redesign marked a significant shift in both form and function. The interface was restructured for clarity and modularity, with collapsible sections that aligned with user mental models. Field groupings were refined, metadata was simplified, and visual hierarchy was improved. This new system addressed both the usability gaps identified in the heuristic evaluation and the deeper needs uncovered through ethnographic research, resulting in a more intuitive experience for both novice and expert users.



Reflections: The Value of Layered UX Approaches

This case exemplifies how layered UX methods such as expert evaluation followed by exploratory user research can lead to meaningful and lasting impact in enterprise systems. Best practices help surface immediate interface problems, but it is through immersive research that we understand root causes and reframe what success looks like. Through this combination of structured evaluation and in-depth user insight, I helped transform SUMMIT into a product that aligns more closely with the current and emergent needs of administrators. This approach also informs my evolving focus on human-AI experiences, where adaptive systems must respond to both stated goals and latent user behaviors, requiring the same combination of structure, empathy, and context-aware design.

At Virginia Tech, I led the end-to-end creation of ASCENT, a design system developed to unify a fragmented internal product that previously lacked any established UX or visual language. The product had grown organically without centralized design oversight, leading to inconsistencies in interface patterns, user flows, and overall experience quality.

Drawing on systems thinking, I redesigned critical workflows and created scalable UI patterns based on user behavior and task structure. ASCENT introduced a cohesive visual language that standardized colors, typography, components, and interaction principles. These assets not only improved design consistency across teams but also made development more efficient and sustainable.

By formalizing a shared design vocabulary, ASCENT became a strategic foundation for product growth and cross-functional collaboration. It transformed a disjointed, ad hoc interface into a coherent, human-centered experience that supported both immediate improvements and long-term scalability.

Reflections: This project reinforced how foundational design systems are to scaling UX across complex products. By grounding interface logic in user behavior and reusable structures, ASCENT positioned the team to evolve more intentionally over time. This experience continues to inform my work in designing adaptive, intelligent systems, where scalable patterns and semantic structure are essential for supporting automation, personalization, and human-AI collaboration.

At Nüvıtek, I led the strategic redesign of the corporate website in close partnership with the CEO. The objective was to reposition the company with a brand identity that felt fun and start-up-like while still conveying credibility and readiness for government partnerships.

1. Positioning: I began with an audit of the existing two-page site and conducted a competitive analysis to identify features and differentiators. I then proposed a strategy for the redesign that involved thinking through the differentiator that marked Nüvıtek as unique. This turned out to be a critical exercise at it got leadership thinking about the strengths that could continue beyond the company's 8(a) graduation in 2028.





2. Strategic Visuals: The CEO wanted a site that did not resemble a typical tech website, with hero sections that stood out even further. To achieve this, I transformed stock imagery through compositing, layering and recoloring to create hero visuals unique to Nuvitek. Inspired by summer motifs and art galleries, the design projected energy and approachability while retaining professionalism.



3. Content and Governance: Content development required more than a year of coordination with the C-suite, with the CEO authoring much of the text. I mentored him in web writing and SEO practices, focusing on user benefits and clarity while avoiding keyword stuffing. This process created content standards that ensured consistency, readability, and sustainability across the site.

4. Design and Development Integration: Rather than handing off designs, I built the site directly using the Figma-to-Framer pipeline, ensuring fidelity between vision and implementation. The site was optimized for desktop and mobile and designed to meet 508 accessibility standards. This integration reinforced Nuvitek’s forward-looking approach while ensuring inclusivity and responsiveness.

5. Business Impact: The redesign elevated the site beyond a marketing refresh to a strategic acquisition tool. It aligned narrative clarity with business goals, strengthened credibility with clients, and set governance standards that extended into proposals and presentations. The result was a scalable framework for brand consistency and growth.

Reflections: This project reinforced my view that corporate SaaS websites, when designed strategically, can function as a strong support for business acquisition while serving as living frameworks for brand governance. By combining positioning, differentiated visuals, content mentoring, accessibility, and development execution, I turned a two-page site into a vehicle for credibility and growth. The experience sharpened my approach to integrating design strategy with business outcomes.

At Nüvıtek, I extended my impact beyond product and platform UX to strengthen the company’s external brand presence. I worked across multiple channels, from physical environments to print, events, and digital platforms, to ensure that Nuvitek’s identity was consistent, credible, and innovative at every audience touchpoint.

Trade Show Booth Design: I redesigned Nuvitek’s trade show booth into a bold, visually distinctive presence. The new design emphasized clarity, hierarchy, and brand visibility, enabling the company to stand out in competitive, crowded expo environments.

The top left image shows the Trade Show Booth as designed before I joined the team. The rest of the graphics show my work.



USDA Symposium Advertisement:I created a full-page ad for the USDA Innovation Symposium that communicated Nuvitek’s role as an AI-powered, low-code solutions partner. The design elevated the brand from being a run-of-the-mill federal contractor to one that communicated sophistication and polish.



Government Correspondence Webinar: I redesigned a public-facing webinar deck on Government Correspondence, framing the content as a clear, brand story for external audiences. The refreshed narrative design highlighted key challenges, benefits, and solutions, positioning Nuvitek as a thought leader in correspondence modernization.

Selected sections of the deck are reproduced to show the "before" and "after" effects.

The "before":



The "after":



Appian Government Conference Promo:I designed a LinkedIn promotional graphic for Nuvitek’s sponsorship of the Appian Government Conference. The design balanced the gravitas of the Capitol backdrop with Nuvitek’s visual identity, signaling both authority and innovation. This extended brand awareness into digital channels and ensured consistency across online and live event communications.



5. Impact: Multi-channel Brand Awareness:Together, these initiatives created a cohesive, multi-channel brand awareness strategy that spanned physical booths, print advertising, event presentations, and digital promotions. Each asset reinforced Nuvitek’s positioning as a forward-looking partner for federal innovation while ensuring that the company’s voice and identity remained unified across diverse forums.

Reflections:What began as individual design deliverables evolved into a coordinated brand storytelling effort. The work demonstrated how aligning visuals and narrative across multiple channels strengthens credibility, amplifies visibility, and ensures that messaging resonates with target audiences in both physical and digital environments.

Project Goal: Blue Collar Objects was an early-stage startup that wanted to build a whiteboard-like application where teams could add, delete, and share sticky notes. Agile retrospective sessions were chosen as the first case example to ground the design. The challenge was to translate this simple concept into an intuitive, engaging digital product that supported real-time collaboration.

My Role: I worked directly with the CEO to define the product requirements, design core user interactions, and deliver a full set of wireframes and high-fidelity prototypes.

Process:I began with requirements gathering, working closely with the CEO to clarify scope and capture essential specifications. From there, I designed wireframes that explored the workflows for adding notes, grouping ideas, and running voting sessions. I then created high-fidelity mockups that mapped the complete journey, including first-time login, idea entry, collaborative grouping, voting, and prioritization. While retrospectives were the grounding use case, I framed them as a springboard for broader applications in digital collaboration, ensuring the workflows were scalable beyond the initial scenario.

Outcome: The project delivered a complete design package that validated the product concept and prepared it for development. The artifacts provided a way for the startup to test feasibility, demonstrate usability, and advance conversations with investors and stakeholders.

Design Thinking in Action: This project reflected the stages of design thinking. I began with empathy, learning how Agile teams conduct retrospectives and identifying common pain points in digital collaboration. I then defined the problem space by narrowing it into clear user tasks such as adding notes, grouping ideas, voting, and prioritizing. Through ideation, I sketched alternative flows and interactions that supported collaboration and prioritization. I prototyped these solutions in wireframes and high-fidelity screens, demonstrating how they would work end to end. Finally, I tested the vision with the founder, enabling validation of the MVP and evaluation of potential next steps with users and investors. By balancing the retrospective example with the broader opportunity of digital collaboration, I helped the startup define a clear path from concept to MVP.

Reflections:The most valuable part of this project was learning how to balance a simple vision with scalable design potential. While retrospectives provided a clear entry point, the workflows were designed to extend to other team scenarios, giving the founder a roadmap beyond the MVP. This work reinforced the importance of designing for both immediate clarity and long-term flexibility in early-stage startups.

Project Goal: Patriot was an early-stage logistics startup aiming to simplify how small shippers connect with carriers and manage shipments. The goal was to design an intuitive digital platform that supported quoting, assignments, shipment tracking, and billing while streamlining coordination between shippers, carriers, and Patriot’s operations team.

My Role: I collaborated directly with the founder to define requirements, create user flows, and deliver models, personas, wireframes, and prototypes. My role spanned from requirements extraction to interaction design, ensuring the product vision could be tested and validated as an MVP.

Process: The project began with requirements gathering, which proved to be the heaviest lift. I was given a dense and highly technical presentation deck that mixed system architecture, business rules, workflows, and operational details without structure. Translating this material into actionable requirements demanded more than conventional UX expertise. It required the ability to synthesize system requirements and recast them as user-centered experience flows. From this foundation, I built a master storyboard of the shipment lifecycle, mapping each step from quote requests through delivery and billing. Relationship and information models clarified how shippers, carriers, destinations, quotations, and payments were interconnected. Anchor flows were created for critical processes such as load assignment, notifications, and confirmations, surfacing alternate paths and exposing gaps. I also designed onboarding flows for shippers and carriers, developed personas and scenarios that captured motivations and constraints, and produced wireframes for carrier and shipper sign-up flows, OPS dashboards, and notifications.

Outcome: The project delivered a comprehensive interaction framework and prototype that allowed Patriot to test its MVP with stakeholders. It clarified business rules, exposed missing requirements, and gave the founder a tangible product vision that could be pitched to investors and prepared for development.

Design Thinking in Action: The project reflected the stages of design thinking. I began by empathizing with the founder’s perspective and the roles of shippers, carriers, and operations staff. I then defined solvable problems by structuring vague and overlapping material into clear requirements. Through ideation, I explored alternative flows and edge cases that would support business complexity. I prototyped these solutions in models and wireframes and tested concepts with stakeholders, enabling validation of feasibility and identification of gaps. Design became the mechanism for sense-making, moving from messy problem space to clarified solution space.

Reflections: One of the biggest challenges was extracting requirements from the founder’s initial presentation deck, which was dense and disorganized. Turning that ambiguity into structured design flows was the most significant contribution of the project. It reinforced the importance of design as a tool for bridging system-level complexity with user-centered clarity. By transforming unstructured requirements into coherent models and flows, I helped Patriot uncover hidden dependencies, refine business rules, and create an MVP vision grounded in both usability and feasibility.

The Project Brief:



Requirements Extraction:



Master Storyboard:



Relationship Model:



Information Model:



Anchor Flow:



Flows for New Users:



Personas & Scenarios:



Patriot Wires for OPS CSR:



Patriot Wireframes Carrier SignUp:



Patriot Wireframes Shipper SignUp:

Project Goal: Curvendar was an early-stage startup building a social calendaring app designed to help users view and integrate public schedules alongside personal events. The goal was to create an engaging, intuitive product that could handle complex scheduling needs while remaining simple for everyday use.

My Role: I was initially engaged for a short two-week usability testing contract, but the role quickly expanded into a nearly two-year engagement as the startup’s primary UX designer and researcher. I led UX research, usability testing, interaction design, prototyping, and visual design, while also contributing to project management and business development.

Process:The work began with user research through interviews, contextual inquiries, and surveys to understand how people discover, manage, and share events. Personas and scenarios were developed to clarify user needs and align the team on priorities. I explored multiple navigation schemes and interaction models to support browsing, integrating, and sharing schedules. Prototypes were created at varying fidelities to visualize flows and test usability, while iterative usability sessions identified and resolved pain points. Collaboration with developers ensured technical feasibility and alignment between design intent and implementation.

Outcome: The app launched successfully in the App Store in April 2014. My design work shaped product focus, ensured usability, and delivered a polished user experience. What began as a short engagement evolved into nearly two years of continuous design involvement because of the impact of the work on product direction and execution.

Design Thinking in Action: The project reflected the design thinking process. I empathized with users through direct research, defined the core problem of merging public and personal schedules, ideated multiple interaction patterns, prototyped navigation schemes and event discovery flows, and tested the product through usability studies. Iteration ensured that the product evolved in line with both user needs and business objectives.

Reflections:Curvendar showed me how design in an early-stage startup often extends beyond traditional UX. I contributed not only to design but also to product strategy, project management, and team growth. The experience demonstrated how research and design can transform a founder’s vision into a consumer-facing product and underscored the value of adaptability, empathy, and iteration in bringing an idea to market.

The image below is a screencapture of the "Example" page on this website. Although the name is changed the deliverables were done for the project.