The Credit Union National Association (CUNA) merged with the National Association of Federal Credit Unions in January 2024 to become America’s Credit Unions. As the existing Director of UX and Product Development, I was tasked with merging the two existing websites into the new America’s Credit Union website.

Merging the two websites was not an easy task, as its revenue is generated from various business practices, including advocacy and fundraising, conference and training sales, Product sales, and membership opportunities. The challenge was to integrate these business lines into one seamless experience for the new organization's membership.

The team I led consisted of a UX researcher, a UX Designer, one frontend developer, and two visual design consultants. Due to the small size of the team, I also contributed to the team in UX research and interaction design.

With an ambitious schedule of delivering a new website in 7 months, it was my responsibility to lead the UX team through a rapid design process. I created a UX framework at CUNA that we adopted for this project. We reviewed all research done to date by both organizations. 90 percent of US credit unions are members of America’s Credit Unions.

At CUNA, we had a pool of over 200 volunteer members throughout the US in various credit union roles to assist us with user studies. This allowed us to ramp up quickly and start conducting studies including card sorting, user interviews, user testing, and surveys.

After evaluating Adobe Analytics and conducting a card sorting user study in Optimal Workshop, I proceeded to create a sitemap for the new America’s Credit Unions navigation. My team and I conducted user tests on areas of high importance to the site to vet the design direction with our core end-users. We conducted short surveys at the end of each user test to gain more insights.

I worked with the visual design consultants and marketing to develop the brand identity and voice for the website. Working within an agile environment, we were able to provide high-fidelity mockups for the engineering team and collaborate with business analysts to establish the necessary requirements in Jira. We also established a Figma design system to assist in future design updates.

We launched on time, and the UX work was on budget in October 2024.

Software Used:

• Figma
• Optimal Workshop
• Usertesting.com
• Adobe Creative Suite
• Drupal

This Health and Human Services (HHS) application serves as the public-facing portal for Medicare appeals. I was hired by the Office of Medicare Hearings and Appeals (OMHA) to lead the user interface and user experience (UI/UX) efforts for the redesign of the portal. The portal's user interface was outdated, and the system's response time was extremely slow.

The timeline for this project was aggressive, and I was unable to gather feedback from end users. The redesign of the portal was based on heuristic analysis and guidance from the U. S. Web Design System.

The key issues that needed enhancements were the following:

• Update the user interface to HHS branding standards.
• Incorporate a global navigation system. The current application employs a hub-and-spoke approach, requiring users to navigate to the home screen to access a new section.
• Update the standard components to comply with the U.S. Web Design System.

Software Used:

• Figma
• Photoshop
• Illustrator

Franklin is a web-based knowledge management application used by United States Postal Service (USPS) call center agents nation-wide. The USPS call centers fields nearly 1 million calls a day.

The Problem

The Franklin application was antiquated and in much need of updating. The system was slow and information within it hard for the agents find, making for long calls and frustrated customers.

The Solution

We started by presenting the executive staff at postal headquarters user research methods and strategies that could reveal how to improve the current system. Upon gaining approval and the budget to conduct the research, we began by visiting the 4 call centers located throughout the US. We interviewed over 50 call center personnel as well as conducted observations of the agents as they fielded calls. The information for each center was evaluated and broken down by site into an executive summary presented to the postal executives.

Here are some of the insights found that surprised the executives:

• Agents desperately wanted a new faster app
• Supervisors had tablets to be mobile, but the current app did not work on them
• The content and scripts within the app were outdated

This information was shared with USPS executes and the development teams. A 2-day design studio was conducted, and a new prototype created shortly afterward to address the many issues found during the research.

New prototypes were received exceedingly well by users and the new application design was approved for development.

Software Used:

• Axure RP
• Photoshop
• Illustrator
• Dreamweaver

Affinity Chart

MCM (Mobile Case Management) is a mobile app used by full-time year-round field representatives at the US Census Bureau to interview individuals and businesses to verify the population within the US and Puerto Rico.

The Challenge

An antiquated Windows application and the cumbersome laptops the field representatives (FR) carried made their daily jobs more difficult.

The Solution

Our solution was a mobile app that FRs can use on a lighter tablet. I led the research and design efforts by conducting user interviews and focus groups with field representatives and executive stakeholders from around the US.

Once the research was completed, it was documented via user flows, affinity charts, and journey maps. The insights learned from the research were used to create a new interface, and usability tests were conducted. After several rounds of updates and user tests of prototypes, the new application went into production within 18 months.

Software Used:

• Axure RP
• Photoshop
• Illustrator
• Dreamweaver

Field Representative Journey Map

It was a wonderful experience to work as the lead web designer for the Office of the President of the United States. I was hired to redesign the website just before the presidential election of 2004. The site was to be redesign regardless of who won the election. During the second term for President George W. Bush, the website redesign was not quite realized; however, during the next 2 years the team made many improvements during my tenure.

Since the team was unable to fully redo the website entirely, myself and 3 other designers put our efforts into creating beautiful page level works of art. The designs created dealt with serious subjects like the war in Iraq and the G-8 Summits to more light-hearted pages done for Barney (the first family´s dog) and holidays. Flash at the time was popular and we used it to create the photo slide shows and games for kid-friendly pages.

In this role, it was an honor to serve the office, the American people and visitors around the world.

Software Used:

• Photoshop
• Illustrator
• Dreamweaver

Halloween Pumpkin Carving Game

During the height of the war in Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom) I was working at InfoReliance as lead Interactive Designer (2009-2011). At this time, I worked on mostly DOD applications finding myself assigned to several new projects to track the care of our wounded warriors. I was very passionate about these projects having grown up in the military as my father was a retired Army Sergeant who served in the Korean and Vietnam wars.

The applications tracked the care of the wounded warriors from the time they were injured, through their recovery process and either back to active duty or their transition into the Veterans care system. I designed 2 systems, one for the U.S. Army, the other for the U.S. Air Force. A third system was the interface which takes feeds from all serves and reports progress up to the Secretary of Defense.

There was virtually no budget for user experience, but I was able to interview some case workers doing the work for the individual wounded warriors. With that information, I was able to create wireframes and visual compositions which were shared with key stakeholders. When the systems were complete and put into production they were well received by the client and case workers for which the applications were built.

Software Used:

• Axure RP
• Photoshop
• Illustrator
• Dreamweaver

Wireframes