UX Design in Practice
I facilitate workshops to align cross-functional teams on project goals, define activities, and create shared understanding from the start. These sessions help uncover user needs and pain points, generate design ideas, outline data collection strategies, and build a clear project plan. By bringing together diverse perspectives, workshops foster collaboration, drive consensus, and ensure that solutions are grounded in both user insight and business priorities. This approach not only accelerates decision-making but also strengthens the foundation for effective design and development.
User-centered design is at the core of how I approach every project. I start by working directly with stakeholders and users—through interviews and workshops—to understand how people actually think, work, and make decisions. From there, I build personas and journey maps to capture those insights and identify opportunities for improvement. I then bring solutions to life through wireframes and prototypes, using data and feedback to refine the experience along the way. The goal is always the same: create solutions that make sense for users while also working within the realities of the business.
Customer Workshops
UX Workshops are a critical first step in defining product requirements. By engaging directly with users, we uncover their needs, pain points, workflows, and platform preferences (e.g., desktop or mobile). These insights form the foundation for the design process, ensuring solutions are aligned with real user expectations and business goals.
These sessions help uncover user needs and pain points, generate design ideas, outline data collection strategies, and build a clear project plan. By bringing together diverse perspectives, workshops foster collaboration, drive consensus, and ensure that solutions are grounded in both user insight and business priorities. This approach not only accelerates decision-making but also strengthens the foundation for effective design and development.
User Interviews
User interviews are one of the most valuable tools in the UX research process, offering direct access to how real users think, feel, and behave. Through open-ended conversations, we can uncover deep insights into user motivations, goals, pain points, and mental models—information that’s often missed through quantitative methods alone. Interviews are especially useful in the early discovery phase, helping to define the problem space, shape personas, and inform the direction of design strategies. They allow us to move beyond assumptions and hear the context behind user decisions, behaviors, and frustrations.
Beyond discovery, user interviews play a critical role throughout the design lifecycle. They can be used to validate concepts, test usability, and gather feedback on prototypes. Interviews help ensure we’re building solutions that truly resonate with users and solve meaningful problems. When paired with other methods—such as surveys, usability tests, or workshops—they provide a well-rounded, human-centered foundation for decision-making. Ultimately, user interviews are not just about collecting data—they’re about creating empathy and building experiences that are both intuitive and impactful.
Sleep Number - Sleep Professionals Interviews
As part of our UX research for Sleep Number, we conducted in-depth user interviews with Sleep Experts to closely examine the current sales process. These frontline employees provided valuable firsthand insight into how the process plays out in real customer interactions. Our interviews focused on understanding how the predefined steps—created by the Sales Executive team—were being interpreted, adapted, or skipped in practice. We explored areas such as customer engagement, needs assessment, product presentation, and how objections and concerns were handled throughout the journey.
By grounding our research in the lived experience of Sleep Experts, we were able to identify where the sales steps aligned well with real-world needs—and where friction or gaps emerged. These insights helped us evaluate not just the structure of the sales process, but also its usability and effectiveness from the perspective of those responsible for executing it. The findings informed actionable recommendations to improve alignment between corporate strategy and on-the-floor realities, ensuring that future iterations of the process are both customer-centric and operationally feasible.
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Persona Development
Creating personas is a core UX skill that helps bring user research to life by humanizing data and transforming it into actionable design guidance. Personas are fictional but data-driven representations of key user groups, developed through qualitative and quantitative research such as interviews, surveys, usage analytics, and field observations. They typically include details such as goals, behaviors, pain points, motivations, and key tasks. When thoughtfully constructed, personas become a reference point that keeps user needs at the center of every design decision.
Sleep Number – Persona Development to Enhance the Sales Experience
As part of a broader initiative to modernize and improve the in-store sales process for Sleep Number, our team developed a set of targeted customer personas to help sales professionals better understand and engage with the diverse needs of their shoppers. The goal was to move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach and equip sales teams with the tools to create more personalized, empathetic, and effective customer interactions.
Through interviews with Sleep Number’s “Sleep Experts” and analysis of sales data and customer feedback, we identified patterns in buyer behavior, motivations, and objections. These insights led to the creation of multiple personas, each representing a key customer type—ranging from health-conscious sleepers looking for long-term wellness solutions, to budget-focused shoppers primarily interested in promotions, to couples navigating differing sleep preferences.
By embedding these personas into the sales process training and documentation, we enabled Sleep Experts to tailor their approach in real time, framing product benefits in language that resonates with each customer type. This shift not only supported a more human-centered selling approach, but also helped align sales techniques with actual customer priorities—improving trust, reducing friction, and ultimately driving conversions.
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Journey Mapping
Journey mapping is a fundamental UX skill that visualizes the end-to-end experience a user has with a product, service, or brand. A journey map typically outlines key stages of interaction—such as awareness, consideration, decision-making, usage, and post-engagement—paired with the user’s actions, thoughts, emotions, and pain points at each step. This holistic view helps teams understand not only what users are doing, but why they’re doing it and where they may encounter friction or unmet needs.
Sally Beauty Supply – Engaging a Younger Demographic
In a project with Sally Beauty Supply, the goal was to improve engagement with younger, beauty-conscious customers who rely heavily on social media for style inspiration and product discovery. Our team focused on creating a detailed journey map centered around a younger female persona, using qualitative research to understand how this audience shops for beauty products, selects hair color trends, and engages with influencers across platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
We conducted user interviews, social listening, and competitive analysis to capture the motivations, pain points, and decision-making behaviors of this demographic. These insights were synthesized into a journey map that illustrated key touchpoints—from awareness and inspiration through to purchase and post-purchase product use. The journey map not only informed future digital personalization efforts but also guided content strategy and helped prioritize features for upcoming website and mobile enhancements.
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Wireframes and Prototypes
Wireframing and prototyping are essential skills in the UX design process, enabling teams to visualize and test design concepts before development begins. Wireframes are low- to mid-fidelity layouts that outline the structure, content, and functionality of a page or screen without the distraction of visual design. Prototypes build on wireframes to simulate interaction—ranging from simple click-through mockups to fully interactive models that mimic user flows and behaviors. Together, these tools provide a tangible way to explore, communicate, and validate design ideas.
Halliburton – Define Workflow and Functionality
At Halliburton, wireframes played a critical role in the early stages of designing a complex internal application. The initial wireframes were used to define the overall layout, user workflows, and the behavior of key interface components. These low- to mid-fidelity wireframes helped communicate ideas clearly to stakeholders and provided a foundation for aligning design decisions with both user needs and technical constraints.
Once the wireframes were vetted internally, they were tested with end users to validate task flows and identify usability challenges. Feedback from these sessions informed the next iteration—higher-fidelity interactive prototypes that more closely mirrored the final product’s look and feel. These prototypes allowed for deeper usability testing and helped stakeholders visualize the final experience.
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Data Gathering and Analysis
At the heart of effective UX research lies the ability to gather and interpret data that reflects the real experiences, behaviors, and needs of users. Data gathering and analysis is not a one-size-fits-all process—it spans a wide spectrum of methodologies, from quantitative data such as analytics, usage metrics, and survey responses to qualitative insights gathered through interviews, contextual inquiry, and observational research.
Medical Procedures for the International Space Station
As part of a human factors research team with Lockheed Martin, I contributed to the development of medical procedures designed for use aboard the International Space Station (ISS). This effort required in-depth analysis of the unique constraints of the space environment and the operational challenges astronauts face during medical emergencies.
The project involved defining step-by-step protocols for various emergency scenarios—such as trauma or cardiac events—tailored to the extreme limitations of spaceflight. A key constraint was the limited equipment available aboard the ISS. Every tool or device must be justified in terms of mass, volume, and versatility. This required a detailed audit of onboard medical kits and a creative approach to multipurpose tool use. We worked closely with logistics teams to ensure that all procedures were compatible with existing resources and did not rely on equipment that was either unavailable or impractical to store.
Beyond equipment availability, our research addressed the complexities of equipment location and retrieval. All supplies on the ISS are stored in color-coded cargo transfer bags (CTBs), often across multiple modules. In emergency situations, quickly locating and accessing the right CTB can be life-saving. We performed task analyses and collaborated with inventory tracking systems to streamline access protocols, ensuring procedures began with clear guidance on locating and verifying supplies.
Perhaps the most critical factor was the zero-gravity environment, which fundamentally alters every aspect of medical care. Our team evaluated how microgravity impacts procedure steps and adjusted them accordingly, including the use of restraints and tethered tools.
This work was a deep exercise in applying user-centered design, systems thinking, and environmental analysis to create realistic, executable protocols under highly constrained conditions. It underscored the importance of context in procedural design and the value of research that anticipates edge-case scenarios to protect human life in the most unforgiving environments.
UX Research and Design – Revionics Retail Pricing Platform
As part of a major user experience initiative with Revionics, a leader in retail price optimization solutions, I conducted end-to-end UX research and design to improve the usability and effectiveness of their pricing platform. Revionics provides retailers with data-driven pricing strategies that span the full product lifecycle—from initial pricing to promotions and markdowns—helping drive both profitability and customer satisfaction.
The project required a comprehensive approach to data gathering and analysis, integrating both qualitative and quantitative methods to build a deep understanding of user needs across diverse retail roles.
We began with a series of stakeholder and user interviews across client organizations to map out who interacts with the software, when, and why. These conversations uncovered a wide range of user roles, from pricing analysts and category managers to marketing and executive-level decision-makers—each with distinct goals and workflows.
Using this insight, I developed a robust set of personas to represent the primary user groups. These personas served as a critical reference point throughout the design process, helping align cross-functional teams on user needs and ensuring that features and interfaces were tailored accordingly.
The next phase focused on wireframing and prototyping key workflows. I created low-fidelity wireframes to test user flows and interaction models, which were iteratively refined based on usability testing sessions. These tests not only provided validation for proposed designs but also revealed pain points related to data visibility, decision-making clarity, and system feedback.
Ultimately, we developed high-fidelity prototypes that demonstrated key pricing scenarios in a simplified, more intuitive interface. These prototypes were tested with real users to ensure alignment with their day-to-day tasks and decision processes.
This project showcased the power of thoughtful research and data analysis in driving user-centered enterprise software design. By grounding decisions in real user behavior and business context, we delivered a more usable, effective platform that supports smarter pricing strategies and better outcomes for both retailers and their customers.
