PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
Design Forge
Owner/Design Consultant
May 2000 – Present
Operation of design consulting business that focuses on providing clients with customer-centered, professional, visually-appealing, unique design solutions for brands, marketing collateral, publications, web sites, and mobile applications. Works closely with clients to ascertain their design needs and produce visual communication solutions.
California Department of Justice
UX and Accessibility Consultant
February 2019 – Present
Provides User Experience (UX) Design for the CURES web application. Creates detail design documentation for client, including user-centered flow diagrams (ITFs), wireframes, content documents, user scenarios, personas, and task profiles. Conducts expert review of the existing web application and reports findings and recommendations to the team. Evaluates usability of existing application, as well as proposed functionality through public user research using various techniques such as focus groups, interviews, surveys, and usability testing. Creates usability test plans, participant criteria/screeners, moderator scripts, and other usability test materials. Develops User Interfaces (UIs), prototypes for usability testing, and UI design specifications. Presents findings and recommendations from various usability tests to project team and facilitates solution discovery sessions.
Participates in project working sessions and Joint Application Design (JAD) sessions. Facilitates review of UX documentation with project team. Provides UI/UX design requirements and input for development of use case documentation. Collaborates with the CURES project team consisting of business analysts, solution architects, developers, testers, program staff, and others to prepare project deliverables, documentation, schedules, and other materials. Assists in User Acceptance Testing (UAT), Accessibility Testing, and end-to-end testing. Identifies, fixes, and provides solutions to defects in UAT. Ensures that interface designs follow ADA Section 508 guidelines for accessibility. Evaluates existing application for 508 compliance and provides assessment and solutions for existing issues. Provides regular feedback and review of redesigned application for 508 compliance.
California Public Employees’ Retirement System
Senior UX Designer (Lead)
April 2012 – July 2013
Lead user experience (UX) design for the most complex and innovative application development and design related needs affecting CalPERS Business Divisions. Supported CalPERS web sites and online services, provided support, mentoring, and guidance as a Lead UX designer to UX team, defined methodology and processes for UX team, conducted Usability Testing of customers, and designed rich user interfaces (UI) for web applications and web sites by applying industry best practices.
California Housing Finance Agency
Graphic & Web Designer
November 2007 – April 2012
Lead the concept development, graphic design and production of Marketing collateral (newsletters, brochures, flyers, posters, print ads) and internal Agency graphic requirements. Provided oversight on administration and usage of graphic and branding standards for the Agency. Provided photography as needed. Managed all aspects of the internal web site (intranet), including, but not limited to, front end development, content updates, testing, maintenance, trouble shooting, site expansion, and web graphics.
California State Teachers’ Retirement System
Graphic & Web Designer
December 2003 – November 2007
Developed the concepts and compositions for promotional displays and marketing collateral for events, products, and services. Designed and laid out publications for both press and online publication. Developed logos and sub-identities for projects, programs, units, divisions, and branches. Developed and implemented guidelines for design. Worked with web maintenance and development teams to create graphics for web sites and web applications. Created eNewsletters and eFlyers. Developed templates for documents, forms, and presentations.