Resume
About Kylie Jack
Kylie is a product designer, user experience strategist, and thought leader with over 20 years of experience in the software industry. Her specialties include product development, design team management, interaction design, and information architecture. She's well-versed in user research, visual fit-and-finish, and has worked on products ranging from embedded systems to mobile devices to enterprise software.
Summary
Skills
design leadership · product management · experience design · ui design · user research · usabililty testing
Specialties
consumer entertainment · music entertainment · finance · retail · health care · e-commerce · embedded / iot / mobile
Tools
axure rp · figma · sketch + invision · principle · adobe xd / illustrator
Technologies
html · css · sass · swift · ruby · javascript · rails · react · vue
Experience
Senior UX Designer
Big Fish Games · Jan 2020 – Sep 2020
Summary: Provided UX consulting for mobile and causal games to in-house and external studios. Wireframed and prototyped 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. Worked with Player Insights (user research) to develop user tests with interactive prototypes. Provided UX support for other internal organizations.
Key games: Gummy Drop, Decurse, Knittens, Coin Heist
Project highlights:
- Created high fidelity UI prototypes for Coin Heist player validation testing.
- Provided actionable concepts and changes based on player research for Knittens and Cooking Craze.
- Designed and storyboarded mini-games for Gummy Drop.
- Redesigned heads up display UI for Decurse.
- Developed process and evaluation criteria for UX lifecycle.
- Designed a web-based career development platform from research, to wireframing flows, to final visual design comps.
- Worked with People and Culture to start a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiative.
- Developed best practices around gender inclusion for games.
Principal Designer · Founder
Nixie Design Studio · 2013–present
Summary: 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: United Way of Austin, Sparkhouse, UserAde, Blue Moon Software, Softmatch
Project highlights:
- 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.
Senior Product Design Lead · UX Manager
projekt202 · 2013 – 2019
Summary: Led design teams to create products and solutions—from consumer mobile to enterprise—via rigorous user research, UX design, and agile project management.
Key clients: Amazon, Apple, CapitalOne, Dell, Mercedes Benz, Novo Nordisk
Key accomplishment: 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 (myself) to eight direct reports.
Project highlights:
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Embedded within Amazon Web Services to help create the Polaris design system to standardize all AWS user interfaces, then re-designed multiple products using it.
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Wrote detailed scenarios and created storyboards to build buy-in and validate concepts for Dell’s enterprise support team, followed by leading a team through participatory design to build an MVP that Dell would later bring to full production.
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Designed a high-fidelity interactive prototype for LeGrand to fully understand information architecture and micro interactions on a commercial 4” touch-screen lighting controller.
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In order to meet the needs of multiple stakeholders, created multiple look and feel concepts for Novo Nordisk’s mobile diabetes tracking app, iterating down to a final concept.
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Conducted stakeholder and user interviews, contextual inquiries, and participatory design sessions.
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Collaborated with researchers to synthesize field data into personas, workflows, and design opportunities.
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Iteratively evolved designs from storyboards and paper sketches, to wireframes.
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Created and evolved design systems and applied them to existing applications.
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Tested designs using heuristic evaluations, multivariate and click testing, and usability studies.
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Proposed visual design directions/mood-boards, narrowed options to a final visual language, and applied them to prototypes and wireframes.
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Projects ranged from embedded devices to enterprise applications, including conference room control system, help desk ticketing, software license management, retail store inventory plus schedule management, and financial transaction and relationship management.
Product Design Manager · Co-Founder
Source Spring · 2008 – 2013
Summary: Consulted for Austin, TX-based startups as a UX designer, product manager, and technologist.
Key clients: ManageMyASC, Rallyhood, Bedrock, Front Gate Tickets, and Matchpad
Key accomplishment: Successfully launched and reached first revenue with four partner startups of whom we were also founding partners.
- Provided consulting for startups including product design and development, project management, system architecture, and scalability planning.
- Provided product design and devlopment consulting.
- 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.
- Managed off-shore teams in Costa Rica, Brazil, and Ukraine.
- Helped companies on-board full-time resources to replace temporary contractors and consultants.
Director of Product Development · Co-Founder
Front Gate Tickets · 2002—2012
Summary: Co-founded Front Gate Tickets. Owned, developed and evolved the entire software product suite including a custom e-commerce platform, retail PoS app, and box office tools.
Key clients: AEG, C3 Presents, Ducat King, String Cheese Incident
Key accomplishment: After growing it to the largest independent ticketing company in the United States, founder team sold to C3/AEG in 2012 with a valuation of 12x EBIDTA.
- Continuously analyzed product requirements from venues, promoters, and artists to handle new requirements like multi-day festivals, reserved seating, merchandise sales, and season tickets.
- Ensured our platform worked beyond the purchasing process and extended in to marketing, analytics, reporting, taxation, talent management, and donor management. I kept us up-to-date with new technologies such as print-at-home tickets, bar code scanning, RFID controls, mobile apps, and Facebook platform integration.
- Architected, developed, 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.
- Worked with security and hosting companies to maintain PCI compliance and 24/7 uptime.
- Provided consulting, training, and integration support for new clients, and technical support to existing clients.
Software Development Manager
Human Code · 1998–2001
Summary: Managed a team of 18 designers, software engineers, and IT staff to create software products for Human Code’s clients.
Key clients: LeapFrog, Nickelodeon, Disney, ABC
Key accomplishment: Built a web-based compiler that worked with local software to assemble education content, compile it for a custom 8-bit ASIC, then deliver it over USB, so that children could have electronic toys with dynamic learning capabilities.
- Gathered requirements and wrote design documents, in addition to establishing user flows, and planning both software architecture and hardware infrastructure.
- Managed complex development teams and environments.
- Wrote applications in Perl, PHP, Java (Swing, J2EE, J2ME).
- Received a patent for database algorithms I developed for a learning technology platform.