Hello, I’m Kylie.

User advocacy and design transformation

Over my design career, each step of the way I’ve nurtured organizations by advocating for user-centered design, teaching design thinking, and building and maturing UX capabilities—not just to improve products and services, but to benefit the organization itself and the people within it. Everyone in an organization impacts and has ownership of customer and user experiences. I mentor and guide people to understand the concepts of design thinking and user-centered design in order to create meaningful, positive impact in the world.

Experience design and product management

In my 26 years of experience (over 12 as a designer and 14 as a developer), I’ve worked in a variety of roles (developer, designer, researcher, product manager) for a diverse group of startups, agencies, and product companies. I focus on user experience design and leadership, because I love engaging directly with users and customers. My specialties include product development, design team management, and user-centered design. I craft and evolve products and services to make a positive impact on people’s daily lives, from work to play.

Portfolio

Product Design

Designing an enterprise tech support tool

Leveraging prior research, I created scenarios, flows and an interactive prototype to inform development of a new enterprise technical support tool for a large computer manufacturer’s customer support staff.

A workflow diagram composed of labeled multi-color blobs

A wireframe of page showing a network diagram for computers being diagnosed

A finished high fidelity design of a network monitoring tool

Interaction Design

Prototyping a lighting control app

Configuring commercial lighting controllers during an installation is a difficult, time-consuming process. Users struggle with complex and poorly designed lighting interfaces. I redesigned the controller interface to make these problems easier.

UI Design

UI Samples

Not only do I make usable interfaces, I make beautiful interfaces. Inside is a small selection of UIs I've created with a comparison to the wireframes they were based on.

A dashboard design for small business opportunity tracking

UX Research and Design

Giving Portal for Charitable Organization

I used generative and participatory user research methods to help a client understand people's giving habits, and used those insights to design an MVP they could socialize within their organization.

Usability Study

Electronic Supplies Buying Experience

My client already had new proposed designs, but with millions of shoppers, they were concerned about the impact of changing their e-commerce experience. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, as well as watching users directly interact with the prototypes, we helped them move forward with the best choice.

Experience

Qumulo

Jan 2021 – present

Sr UX Designer

Studio D Radio Durans

Sep 2020 – Dec 2020

Assoc Researcher

Responsibilities: Interviewed research subjects and observed them in situ. Synthesized qualitative data. Developed and illustrated concept maps, journeys, workflows, frameworks, and charts. Assisted in identifying and recruiting leads. Wrote and created written report and deck for client firm.

Big Fish Games

Jan 2020 – Sep 2020

Sr UX Designer

Responsibilities: Provided UX/UI consulting for mobile and causal games to in-house and external studios. Wireframed, prototyped, and designed UIs for user onboarding, social and community features, as well as other meta-game experiences. Developed criteria and heuristics tailored to game design in order to have a consistent company-wide UX evaluation process.

Games: Gummy Drop · Decurse · Knittens · Coin Heist
Using stakeholder research, created best practices, process, and design pillars for the UX team’s vision and roadmap, and to help the organization to better understand the value of UX.
Created high fidelity UI prototypes for Coin Heist player validation testing. Designed and storyboarded mini-games for Gummy Drop.
Developed process and evaluation criteria for UX lifecycle, as well as gender inclusion guidelines.
Designed a web-based career development platform from research, to wireframing flows, to final visual design comps.

projekt202

2013 – 2019

Sr UX Designer · Design Manager

Responsibilities: Led design teams as creative director. Managed 8 direct reports. Created flows and wireframes. Designed user interfaces for desktop and mobile applications. Prototyped applications in Sketch and Axure. Collaborated with product managers to set strategic direction of design projects. Performed user research, synthesized data from research into personas and opportunities, and ran usability testing sessions.

Key clients: Amazon · Apple · CapitalOne · Dell · Mercedes Benz · Novo Nordisk
Created proposals and narratives of prior work that won the Seattle office $850,000 in new client work in 2018 allowing it to grow the local design group from one person (self) to eight direct reports.
Embedded within Amazon Web Services to help create the Polaris design system to standardize all AWS user interfaces, and re-designed multiple products using that system.
Wrote detailed scenarios and created storyboards to validate concepts for Dell’s enterprise support team, and led a 3 person design team through participatory design study to build an MVP.
Designed a high-fidelity interactive prototype for LeGrand to fully understand information architecture and micro interactions on a commercial 4” touch-screen lighting controller.
Created multiple look and feel concepts for Novo Nordisk’s mobile diabetes tracking app.

Nixie Design Studio

2013 – present

Principal Designer · Founder

Responsibilities: Provide UX and product design consulting for startup software companies looking to evolve their minimum viable products to the next step via experience strategy, user research, product design and prototyping, and software development.

Key clients: Softmatch · United Way of Austin · Sparkhouse · UserAde · Blue Moon Software
Designed dashboard UIs for Softmatch, and helped implement form interfaces in Salesforce.
Performed in-depth user research to help United Way of Greater Austin understand their users. Designed a working prototype of a possible MVP for them to socialize and build buy-in within the organization.
Expanded upon a broad and confusing cryptocurrency concept at UserAde from paper to storyboards, and using our new understandings built a functional mobile prototype with visual UI fit-and-finish.
Created workflows and visual comps to simplify Blue Moon Software’s document/form generation system and e-commerce system platform.

Source Spring

2008 – 2013

Product Design Manager · Co-Founder

Responsibilities: Consulted for startups as a UX designer, product manager, and technologist. Helped them design, build and launch new products or product offerings. Performed user research and designed concepts based on those results. Created wireframes and prototypes. Acted as a "virtual CTO" helping companies define and refine system architecture and scaling past initial launch.

Front Gate Tickets

2002 – 2008

Director of Product Development · Co-Founder

Responsibilities: Continuously analyzed product requirements from venues, promoters, and artists to handle new requirements like multi-day festivals, reserved seating, merchandise sales, and season tickets. Architected, designed, programmed, and implemented web application and desktop software suite as well as database back end. Managed product road map and oversaw entire software life cycle from requirements gathering and design to QA and maintenance over several full product releases and migrations.

Contact

Praise

“

Kylie has an excellent sense of why the magic is missing from a product, and clarity of vision on where it needs to go. They have great soft skills and help create team alignment through UX schemes. Often, I would find that Kylie could skillfully convey concepts in a just few bullet points that I would take paragraphs to describe.

—Natasha (peer)
Sr Game Designer

“

Kylie’s ‘all-in’ and ‘how can we…?’ attitude motivated me (and all the other designers) to do their best work even when faced with challenging conditions.

—Dana (direct report)
Product Design Lead

“

Kylie helped HR save a Development platform project that was struggling, and I personally worked with them to establish a budding DEI program that has provided tangible improvement to the business.

—Christina (peer)
Sr Tech Recruiter

“

Kylie positioned themself as a catalyst for our group, helping us understand and guide each other. They brought more empathy to our practice, taught our team and game teams design thinking, while maintaining a presence and sense of humor.

—Harry (peer)
Sr UX Designer

“

Kylie consistently followed through on her end to create meaningful partnerships that made it easy for us to devote time and effort to a project that was of critical importance to all parties involved.

—Kevin (vendor)
Recruiting Manager

“

Kylie transformed what would’ve been a very modest site into a beautiful, professional and user-friendly platform. Kylie mapped out a realistic timeline, designed excellent wireframes and UI, and conducted productive user testing. The results were far above my expectations.

—Kris Olsen (peer)
Learning & Development