Senior Product /UX Designer

Converging independently

I started redesigning Educate before Courtney, Amazon's design point of contact, showed us anything.

When she later revealed the final designs from the team behind Amazon's design language, they were very close to my redesign draft. The color was almost the same; the differences were mostly spacing, the header, and navigation.

Amazon owned that language. I extended it.

Related programs, different models

AWS Educate is kind of like Coursera or Khan Academy for AWS: people sign up because they want a certificate so that they can have credibility for hiring purposes.

I worked primarily on Educate, with additional work on re/Start and Academy.

The important part was understanding where the programs genuinely overlapped and where they did not.

When I first joined as a UX consultant, I had no direction and no tools. Instead of sitting on my hands, I copied the existing Educate site into Figma so I could understand it.

The Educate course cards were the first thing I needed to resolve. Most of the metadata already existed and had gone through approvals, so I wasn't deciding what went on the card.

I was deciding what mattered first, how it read at a glance, and how that hierarchy held together across screen sizes.

Something I wanted to exist

I wanted a simple place where anyone could share what they were carrying and know another person had taken the time to pray for them.

For about two years, I used the K-LOVE Christian radio app every day to request prayer and pray for others. From there, I used every prayer community I could find.

AmenPrayers grew out of those years.

I'm a man of faith. These are things I'm passionate about.

Designing and building it

I designed the responsive interface and built the application in React and Firebase.

The public experience includes posting, responding, saving, and reporting. Underneath it are authentication, persistent data, roles and permissions, moderation, reports, and administrative tools.

Making the page a master component

Customers followed a link from a confirmation email, entered an order ID, and saw the current state of their order.

The shared Figma design files had to show that same page in many variations: different statuses, sections, copy, and combinations of conditions.

I moved the team's design library from Sketch to Figma and built the entire Order Lookup page as a master component with nested atomic components and Auto Layout.

Individual paths became component instances. A designer could show or hide sections, override labels and copy, or represent a different status without copying the design into a new frame.

When I first introduced the component approach, the file contained roughly 20 screens. It later grew to roughly 200 screens and paths.

The shared master component changed the way we worked as a team.

A spreadsheet-like tool for building websites

Health plans used Optum StepWise to sell coverage online: sites where brokers, employers, and people could get quotes, compare plans, and enroll. Implementation consultants like our team built those sites in StepWise Designer.

Designer behaved a little like a spreadsheet: rows, columns, formulas, parameters, and settings determined web pages, multi-step forms, and complete rendered websites.

I helped improve Designer itself, and I worked with the HTML websites it produced.

Making an idea concrete enough to judge

One concept I spent a lot of time thinking about was an early scripted banking chatbot.

In Sketch, I could draw the chat bubbles, but not the conversation. A couple of messages took a lot of screens, and how the conversation branched was impossible to visualize.

So I built it in HTML.

It made the interaction easier to comprehend.

Prototype you can try

I designed in Sketch and built interactive HTML prototypes when static screens could not communicate an idea clearly.

I worked with a large UX team at Capital One Investments, where quantitative and qualitative research informed exploratory product work.

I also worked on a retirement simulator and several smaller concepts.

Six years designing a living online community

My co-founder pitched the idea at a McDonald's, and I started prototyping.

What followed was six years of designing a live community with forums, private messaging, shops, games, trading, a user marketplace, administrative tools, and a layered avatar system.

Of all the work in this portfolio, Ernya is where the most parts of my practice first came together: product thinking, interface design, visual design, front-end work, community behavior, and the long-term consequences of product decisions.