With design
in mind.
I organized this page to make it easy for you to find what you're looking for.
Recent case studies
Designing for Savings: A Case Study on UX Solutions That Cut Time and Cost on Development (Coming very soon...)
Design system case study: Helping an Established SaaS Company Develop and Use their First Design System (Coming very soon...)
Work experience
Principal and Senior Product Designer
Hoag Health System
Chicago, IL / remote
2023 - present
I was hired by Hoag to address the significant issue of patient fragmentation across multiple healthcare providers. As a leader in the UX domain, I spearheaded the development of a platform aimed at tackling this problem. This initiative required extensive research and allocated resources. I led various workstreams, including the creation of centralized patient experiences throughout the network and the analysis of large-scale surveys encompassing patient perspectives. My role involved driving the design and implementation of solutions to achieve the overarching goal of reducing fragmentation and improving the patient experience.
Lead UX
Sulos
Chicago, IL / remote
2022 - 2023
I joined the Sulos team as the lead designer for a remote patient monitoring application in the field of palliative care. My role involves driving strategic initiatives and planning to enhance the system's user experience by connecting patients, their families, care teams, and care coordinators at palliative care organizations. By adopting a research-driven and user-focused approach, I am helping the company prioritize user needs in the development process and shift away from a team-centric focus.​
Senior UX Design Consultant ​
Envestnet​
Chicago, IL / remote 2021 - 2022​
During my time at Envestnet, I established myself as an inclusive design leader and strong user advocate. I oversaw the experience strategy and UI/UX design for Envestnet’s core foundational financial products, upon which all other products relied. My focus was on demonstrating the value of human-centered design to VP-level business stakeholders and managing UX collaboration. ​
Senior UX Design Consultant
PepsiCo
Chicago, IL / remote
2020 - 2021
During my time at this role, I worked with a small consulting team to build custom ecommerce solutions for PepsiCo from the ground up. I had the opportunity to apply my skills in UX design and product management to lead the planning, strategy, and roadmap of the platform. Additionally, I worked with the client to learn about their customers and pain points, which helped me translate them into real solutions."​
Senior UX Design Consultant
Walmart
Chicago, IL / remote
2020
I had the opportunity to work with great UX teams helping to modernize Walmart's dynamic pricing legacy systems. I applied my skills as a researcher and took the lead in conducting user research for one of the company's pricing systems. Additionally, I used my design research findings to design the next generation of the platform. As a mentor, I also worked with junior designers to help them improve their skills, particularly in the areas of deliberation and problem-solving.
Senior UX Design Consultant
Walgreens
Chicago, IL
2019
As a UX consultant on the team, I worked with a large UX team and researchers to reshape the future of the next-generation pharmacy application. I applied my UX skills to lead the domain of patient profile and patient registration, consolidating a large amount of data into a meaningful ecosystem of relevant content which influenced the designs and drove design discussions.
Head of Product
Doogma
Chicago, IL
2018 - 2019
At Doogma, I had the privilege of leading the entire user experience for the company's core product customization technology. I oversaw the design of product configuration experiences for clients' ecommerce sites, ensuring that the end-to-end experience was seamless. Additionally, I worked closely with the CEO to identify strategic, intuitive solutions that would translate into scaling MRR.
Senior UI/UX Designer
Sears Holdings Corp.
Chicago, IL
2014 - 2017
Pivoting from a startup culture into a enterprise-level environment at Sears America, I used my extensive knowledge of building the Sears platform Shop Your Way to design numerous projects for the company, such as Pebble, Sears Auto, and mainly the Personal Shopper app. These projects included leading the visual experience and developing detailed wireframes and prototypes.​
Art Director
Sears Israel​
Tel Aviv, Israel
2010 - 2014
I joined the Sears Israel team shortly after it was acquired by Sears U.S. and collaborated with great designers, product managers, and leadership to redefine the online shopping experience and transform Shop Your Way into a mega site used by millions of shoppers. This included collaboration with teams on the U.S. side and bringing many ideas to life. Additionally, I established the first design studio at Sears Israel and hired designers and freelancers to support our efforts.
eCommerce
UX EXPERIENCE IN ECOMMERCE
Custom Solutions
Creating a custom solution often means building experiences from the ground up. Product discussions, such as those related to the Order Management System, can impact the UX. In the Foods For Goods project, we planned, designed, and delivered experiences such as E2E customer journeys, multiple shopping carts, backend design, dashboard design, and more.
Pricing and Analytics Systems
UX EXPERIENCE IN ECOMMERCE
Retailers like Walmart use big data and processing power to create, manage, and track prices. In the Walmart case study, I worked with the in-house UX team to take their existing pricing system and enhance it, enabling users to develop more effective pricing strategies.
UX EXPERIENCE IN ECOMMERCE
Product Customization
To develop a good product configurator experience, you need to keep two important points in mind. First, customers are not designers, so providing too little or too much customization can hinder the user experience. Second, building product configurators is challenging because each product is different and requires in-depth analysis. In the Doogma case study, I assisted the company in leveraging UX to address these challenges and provide a smooth product configurator experience for their customers.
SaaS
The process of developing a SaaS website involves more than just UX design. Defining the right pricing model, getting traffic to validate design decisions, executing short-term marketing plans, and balancing intuition with validated design decisions are just the beginning.
Peer-to-peer
mobile app
At Sears, we introduced a personal shopping application service that offers one-on-one online personal shopping assistance to customers. The service is provided through two separate mobile apps, one for the consumer and one for the personal shoppers team.
Social eCommerce
In 2012, Sears embarked on an ambitious project to provide millions of online shoppers with an innovative eCommerce experience through a single platform.
This four-year project presented numerous design challenges. Brand pages, application marketplaces, user ratings and reviews, recommendations, and many other experiences were all built from the ground up.
Healtcare
UX EXPERIENCE IN HEALTHCARE
Enterprise Pharma Application
Walgreens systems are used by over 85,000 healthcare service providers across the country to ensure patient safety and to serve millions of customers.
I assisted Walgreens in redesigning the digital experience of its internal system, which pharmacists and technicians use to serve customers and patients.
I worked primarily on Discovery, UX, and usability testing across two main business domains: Patient Search and Patient Registration.
Research & Discovery
At Walgreens I worked on two discovery workstreams:
The first one is about viewing and registering patient profiles as well as intake of new prescriptions. The second one is more around the global search experience.
Medical Chatbot
Can be great tool to help identify different types of medical issues or injuries and suggest recommendations.
The technology behind is based on Expert Systems which basically try to mimic a real doctor asking questions and suggesting next steps based on the answers.
Fintech
Wealth Management
To stay competitive, large fintech enterprises invest millions of dollars in replacing outdated legacy systems and developing new platforms so that their financial advisors can manage investors’ portfolios in a much more modern and efficient manner than before.
Envestnet/Yodlee had brought me on board to assist in the development of the company’s core product for portfolio accounting management.
New way of doing
UX Process
The fundamental shared understanding that “we don’t have the answers, but we have the process to find them” is the secret sauce for creating great products with great teams.
Identifying UX design scope
UX design is divided into three categories: Customer Experience (CX), Journey-Level, and Interaction Level (IxD).
The first is frequently referred to as the UX ecosystem, and it includes all three scopes, but one thing is shared by all three scopes: the user is always in the center.
Starting with humans and working backwards
Understanding human behavior and empathizing with your users/customers is an obvious part of UX design, but the time it may take to deeply empathize with users’ problems and needs is less obvious.
Why does it take so long to get to know your customers?
- What people say they want may not always be what they actually need.
- There is a separation between what people say, think, and do.
- People change, their expectations change, and so does your product. This increases the complexities and influences the decisions made when designing UX.
Flexible design process
When I present my design process to companies, I do so with the understanding that their project may or may not have a design process in place, which necessitates an analysis to determine what changes the design process needs to make in order to meet the project goals.
For example, a short-term startup project may be aiming for a specific outcome, such as delivering an MVP for testing, which may mean focusing less design bandwidth on discovery and research and more on collaborations with business stakeholders to identify the right problems.
Every project is unique and necessitates process modification to accommodate various constraints.
Company process analysis
When I start a new project, I go through the following steps:
- Interviewing stakeholders and designers is one step in the process of identifying gaps and filling them with recommendations.
- Identifying existing processes or proposing new ones that do not exist
- Stakeholder product questionnaires are being developed.
- Stakeholder meetings
UX Tools
Choosing which UX tools to use for a project can be difficult at times, but the great thing about them is that they are flexible and adaptable.
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User Research & UX Audit
Business Questionnaires & User Interviews
Each project begins with research. I concentrate on user and business side research to answer questions like, “What are users trying to accomplish?” What are their main issues, and how are they dealing with them now? On the business side of the equation, research can help answer questions like, “What is the current business’s revenue model?” What are the goals and objectives of the company? Is there an existing product vision? Moreover, what problem do they fail to solve and why?
Existing customer journey mapping
Mapping out a company’s current customer experience and operations is critical for getting a sense of the big picture. It reveals gaps and raises numerous questions.
UX Audit
UX auditing is done by analyzing existing user flows to identify frustrations and loopholes that prevent users from completing a task and businesses from archiving their objectives.
Part of testing what’s ‘wrong’ in an expensive system is relying heavily on analytics, but also on user interviews for insight.
Usability Testing
It is fun when there’s a UX researcher on the team because they alleviate a lot of the heavy lifting by validating design decisions so you can focus on the problems and design solutions for them.
But that’s not always the case. in some smaller companies, I needed to wear the researcher hat and help the team gain read user feedback and gather the findings.
and very importantly, what problem they fail to solve and why?
Discovery & Definition
Running discovery sessions
Team discovery sessions are an excellent UX tool. It aids in revealing the problems, questions, and answers that the team requires in order to achieve true team consensus. It is a critical component of a project, and team members rely on the insights and learnings from those sessions to make subsequent design decisions.
Definition & Terminology
Humans tell stories. When we believe in the same story, we work better together. If you want everyone on the team to understand and believe the same story, you must create a common language. It begins with a vision and progresses to shared terminology and understanding of things.
It is also an excellent tool for relieving confections and frustrations.
Design & Validation
Wireframing
Wireframes are divided into three stages:
- low-fi wireframes Sketches have a low cost and are very useful during the discovery phase, where it is easy to experiment with different design directions in a short period of time.
- High-fi wireframes Typically, functional wireframes are created to reflect what will be built.
- Prototype level wireframes Those are typically to support user interactions and journeys
All three can be used to plan a single interaction, a user flow, or an entire journey.
Prototyping
Building a prototype during the design process serves three primary purposes:
- Increasing client alignment
- User Research – usability testing
- Delivery handoff – It is dependent on the nature of the project. In some projects, UX/UI handoffs result in much more functional deliverables that necessitate a very detailed write-up about the functionality and usability.
User experience and
Product Ownership
Owning an E2E experience
Leading Initiatives with cross-functional teams
Delivering great UX sometimes necessitates driving and leading a design initiative outside of your project and contributing to the entire organization so that it can later support your project. This is frequently the case in large-scale projects involving cross-functional teams.
That could include emphasizing the significance of user research and conducting it independently. Alternatively, you may decide to contribute to the global design system library in order to improve the UX for a specific component.
Stakeholder engagement & communication
Leading UX areas in a product requires you to keep your team close and aware of your design solutions and their intent. Owning a UX also entails acting as a project manager and creating products that meet the needs of your team in order to achieve global consensus.
But there’s something even more important here: how you build and cover your stories to achieve a high level of clarity and engagement, which will generate the feedback you need to move forward in the design process.
Strategy & UX Planning
Strategic thinking & making important UX decisions
Big decisions are frequently made behind closed doors by powerful leaders. They decide on the team’s structure and who will be on it, as well as the product’s direction and vision, among other things.
It recognizes the significance of team collaboration in making those critical decisions at the start of a project that determine whether or not a product will be successful.
Building key metrics to measure UX success.
Typically, the ux designer defines and works collaboratively with product and PMs to identify the key metrics needed to measure the effectiveness and success of a design. There are various types of metrics, and it is critical to apply them to the existing experience and compare them to the new experience design.
Bootstrapping & maintaining
Design Systems
Bootstrapping design-system architecture
Choosing frameworks VS custom components
The amount of time designers will end up spending on maintaining custom UI components is a critical strategic decision that is usually best made at the start of a project.
For example, using the Material Design UI framework may be the best approach for an MVP, whereas developing custom components will provide more flexibility in customizing the UX and allow teams to develop their variations independently in other projects.
Storybook to manage consistent UI library
A live source from which anyone can test the development, interaction, and usability of any UI component is extremely beneficial for a consistent design system.
Aside from being the single source of truth so that no one has to guess how a dropdown should function, it is also a great way to test and refine the experience by opening bugs and enhancements rather than based on a Figma design.
Components & UX patterns documentation
How component & UX Patterns differ
A component could be as simple as a dropdown, or it could be defined to include multiple variations.
A composite component is one that is made up of other components. For example, a panel to manage a column table or a slide in panel with search.
A UX pattern is a collection of UI components or composite components that are combined to form an experience that can include multiple interactions and user flows.
Balance between very little to too much control in design guidelines
A global design system that is used across multiple platforms frequently addresses the issue of how much control to give designers when designing other company products. While there are numerous approaches to this, one good practice I’ve discovered is that each team can inherit ‘ingredients’ (for example, a simple dropdown) from the global design system while also maintaining their own library to keep custom-made components and UX patterns in place and feeding off updates from the global design system.
Versioning
Large-scale design systems and the need for version tracking
Inconsistencies in the development of UI components occur when developers are unsure of which version to work on and designers struggle to maintain both work-in-progress, ready for dev, and currently developed versions. That’s three distinct versions!
It is a difficult task, and there is no magic solution; instead, it is necessary to test various approaches and see which ones work best.
One solution that has proven to be effective is the integration of Figma and Storybook, which provides links to the most recently developed designs while maintaining two separate files on Figma. One for designers and the product, and one for handoff that includes multiple versions.
UI Design
UI and UX go hand in hand. Giving more focus to ease of use, esthetics or accessibility will not only directly impact the end-user experience but also the cost, design & development time
Common complex UI challenges
Go custom UI vs out-of-box
Choosing a UI framework and whether to build things from scratch is a strategic decision that both product and development should be involved in making at the start of a project.
Creating custom components allows you to control the UX and create unique components, but it also necessitates a high level of maintenance. Using out-of-the-box components means less control over the UI; designers must be familiar with the boundaries, and when developing new components, a new type of entity must be maintained separately, which requires additional effort.
Continuous UI enhancement
The UI components evolve alongside the product. Components may appear simple to design, but the initial version of a component later evolves into a more thoughtful experience.
Usability & Accessibility
Color contrast matrix
While I am not an accessibility expert, some important decisions must be made regarding who your users are and how to ensure that all of them can clearly see and navigate your site.
Accurate handoff process & micro-level usability write-ups
Photoshop remains the most popular tool for creating bitmap images. Photoshop is my go-to tool for creating high-quality visuals. To build a winning imagery, the process of creating ultra high visuals such as those seen on Apple and Google products requires proper planning, serious visual discovery, and a lot of trial and error. Today, more than ever, your audience is trained to recognize whether or not you have high-quality visuals, which are essential for building trust.
Mastering
Visual Design
Crafting ultra high quality assets that stands out!
Photoshop remains the most popular tool for creating bitmap images. Photoshop is my go-to tool for creating high-quality visuals. To build a winning imagery, the process of creating ultra high visuals such as those seen on Apple and Google products requires proper planning, serious visual discovery, and a lot of trial and error. Today, more than ever, your audience is trained to recognize whether or not you have high-quality visuals, which are essential for building trust.
Images that tell stories
Creating images that tell a story is difficult. A good story or idea is essential. An idea can be as simple as a few words, and if the image is good enough, it can replace the words, leaving less room for interpretation.
Some landing pages today are excellent examples of how images and content can tell incredible stories.
A good story is made up of elements such as characters, heroes, conflict, resolution, and so on, but the really cool thing is that you can build good stories by changing, adding, or removing different elements, giving you different ways to tell stories.
Iconography
Using icons can be as simple as using one that has already been created. However, every good designer understands that creating the right icons takes time and effort. There are a few icons that most people recognize, such as no entry and home, but context is everything. Icons must be carefully designed, especially when they are colored.
Meaningful Illustrations
Illustrations are an excellent way to tell stories. This has become so popular in the product design space that companies are hiring dedicated illustrators. The true challenge of creating good illustrations lies in determining who the characters are. What message do they send to users? What will my audience think when they see them? Are they gendered or neutral? Will they make my audience happy or overwhelmed?
Experience through
Branding
Brand architecture
A brand framework is made up of many different pillars, such as consumer profiles, brand essence, mission, positioning & personality, values, visual identity, and so on.
Not every brand is mature enough to build those foundational pillars on day one, but viewing a brand through this architectural lens opens up opportunities for the brand to evolve and ultimately succeed.
Way more than just a logo
A $5 logo design is still a long way from replacing the true process of creating a professional logo for a brand. Designing a custom logo from scratch necessitates a thorough understanding of both the design and the process of getting there. Companies I designed logos for took up to two months to find the right option, the connection, and the story behind it.
