Design leader, team creator-motivator, mentor, speaker and author
What I bring
Product design leadership involves orchestration of business leadership and organizational alignment expertise to be the store of institutional design knowledge and evangelize the objectives throughout the organization, including external resources. Each touchpoint of a product initiative must have a single source of business-aligned design truth with experienced centralized decision-making ability. I bring this to each product, feature, project that I lead, minimizing the risk and ambiguity often associated with the design side of product.
I bring a voice of battle-tested experience within the organization and without, with years of honed presentational materials and ideas well-explained for all audiences. I've seen time and time again that communication is vital to the success of a product, digital or otherwise. I use various methods to deliver a cohesive vision to all stakeholders, keeping the entire organization informed through the process.
Take a step forward with me to give your organization a leg up on the competition.
Coming in 2025 - ALIGNING PRODUCT - A practical guide to successful product design and delivery in modern enterprise organizations.
Principles
Big-picture meets practical application
Synthesizing the core principles of over 25 years of design and user experience into the tactical steps necessary to create and launch the product that meets ALL the needs of the business.
Product design life cycle
A visual flow of an ideal design and development cycle, taking in account the agile nature of design and test cycles to refine approach and learn from users and stakeholders
Experience
Frontier Airlines
Sr. Manager, Digital Experience
UNDERTAKING
With 68,000 + passengers a day, between $4.4-14m dollars a day, the mobile app and site are the complex cash registers of Frontier Airlines. That much volume and mission-critical pressure to perform requires laser-focus and dedication to all of the moving pieces and people involved in this massive project. Large and complex are my forte and so I jumped in and became one of the key players on board. From board-presentations and budgets to choosing key players and partners, it took a steady hand to bring the ball over the line.
COMPREHENSIVE PLAN
A complete ground-up redesign of the mobile application and website with exhaustive user research and testing as the foundation to deliver the business-to-customer ideals that would make the airline the most successful in class. The initiative involved not only the executive team and C-suite but also the integration of over 12 business units that had key institutional knowledge and responsibility that affected or were affected by the mobile app. Orchestrating key responsibility-chain with design team and the development team was critical to the success of each phase of this complex project.
TEAM
I created a 10-person team from inception that could tackle and deliver at each milestone. Communication and organizational principles were of primary importance to keep design and dev teams in sync as well as informing stakeholders with time-sensitive updates at each stage.
DESIGN SYSTEM
The team created a custom Design System (Frontier Co-Pilot) that became the single source of truth for the airline's digital output. The marketing division and every team affected adopted our system, recognizing the value of what we put together professionally.
Inmotion
Design Director, CE/UX
PROJECT ABSTRACT
The design team, sales and marketing worked together to get a new site greenlit. The ask was for a site that converted better and used modern technology, design concepts, UX principles and was mobile-friendly.
RESEARCH
The team completed 100s of hours of research, persona development and user testing, analysis and graphing to build the user landscape before development/design. While in dev, the team would test prototypes to continually make minor adjustments as needed for success.
LEADERSHIP
Leading my team of designers and researchers was rewarding as I communicated high-standards and quality of work which resonated in the enthusiasm and end product.
DESIGN/DEVELOPMENT
During the design phase, presenting and evangelizing to the leadership team where we were headed and how we were going to get there was key. Once, approved/budgeted, keeping the development team on track and holding them to high standards during the agile process resulted in a successful, well-received site.
QSC Cloud IoT initiative with remote hardware monitoring UI
RESEARCH
I led an extensive series of interviews with users from the bottom of the organization to the top and all the user types on the spectrum. The aggregate result of this research was diagrammed in a heatmap spreadsheet and thoroughly analyzed by the team to produce interesting signals we could use for the next steps.
BRAINSTORM/IDEATE
I led the team in a series of interactive sessions to tease out all of the ideas and challenges after the research analysis informed us of the signals our users gave us - defining the problem space.
WIREFRAME/PROTOTYPE
Both low and hi-fidelity wireframes were produced and tested with internal and external sources. Prototypes were built from rounds 1 and 2 then also rigorously tested with another group, then revised and ultimately sent to visual design for final output that developers could use to build the product.
Travelport customer data management portal
RESEARCH
In-person interviews were conducted with customers and internal employees. Empathy maps were created with the team to inform the sophistication of the feature sets.
BRAINSTORM/IDEATE
Taking into consideration the global nature of the customer, I made sure that ethnographic considerations were in place during the brainstorming.
WIREFRAME/PROTOTYPE
Because of timelines, only high-fidelity wires were created but tested with global teams to shake out any issues.
DOCUMENT/PLAN
Working closely with developers and leadership, a rigorous design system was laid out to guide engineers and future teams alike without a designer having to be onsite.
Work Briefs
Brief samples of past work. Send me a note for more detailed descriptions.
Salsa Labs - Identity and site rebrand
Adobe Systems Inc - Developer multimedia promotion
Wayin - Social photo sharing app (iOS and Android)
Quantum - Enterprise storage systems app (iOS)
Fitness mag - Your New Body app
AeroGrow - Site UX refresh
Honeywell - Control Systems marketing multimedia
Sun Microsystems - Solaris 7 multimedia interactive
Markel Homes - Real Estate UX redesign
Nike - interactive presentation tennis promotion
Alec Uitti
A UX practitioner with over 20 years of experience building UI, being a team member and managing teams in both San Francisco and the Colorado front range. Working with a wide variety of companies and organizations as contractor and staff.
