Resume
Don’t let the blonde hair fool you. I’ve been designing delightful experiences around web content & community for about a decade! Truly lucky to have a record of working with awesome people creating magical experiences online.
PROFESSIONAL PROFILE
Ambitious and creative product manager and experience designer seeking to build exciting online experiences. For the past 10 years, I’ve taken great pride in making the web easy, efficient, and fun for users. I bring interdisciplinary passion and boundless curiosity, and can juggle a wide range of tasks and goals. Extremely self-motivated and organized, I thrive on leading and contributing to a team that reliably exceeds expectations. I’m eager to move the web and the world forward.
The online experiences I create are a combination of elegant to whimsical with an emphasis on ease of use. I love being part of a project from the rough beginning until the happy end!
SKILLS
• Creating great product, with emphasis on design
• Project coordination, cross-group collaboration
• Wireframes, mockups, use cases, agile development
• UI & UX design, information architecture
• Social media & user-generated content (including community management, forum moderation & knowledge base documentation)
• Customer community & support software (e.g. fluent with Zendesk & Get Satisfaction)
• Google analytics, omnivore, user testing & design research
• HTML & CSS (standards compliant code) & some JavaScript (frameworks jQuery & Moo Tools)
• Content strategy, taxonomy development, advanced writing, blogging, copyediting, wordsmithing of all kinds (including inline error messaging)
• Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, Pages, Omnigraffle, WordPress, Drupal, Sharepoint, Plone, custom content management systems, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook Page & audience development, DIA’s Salsa, Exact Target, Marketo, MailChimp, Salesforce.com, AdWords, SEOMoz, Basecamp & Highrise
• Experienced public speaker & presenter
Since leaving PlumTV, where I led online product design and community for 8 regional markets across the U.S., I’ve been an independent Customer Experience Designer (CX) for the past 24 months for a diverse series of startups (Huffington Post, 2tor.com, & Zendesk are just a few). I’ve created and implemented a fun and successful series of custom website designs, data visualization, content strategy, and applications for various outreach & audience development efforts focused on cultivating community (both within applications and externally across social networks).
My entrepreneurial spirit is best revealed in my writing, where I cover design, development, and interesting stories as an editor and writer for Carsonified’s Think Vitamin Blog and Huffington Post Tech, Media, & Education sections. More recently I have co-founded 52 Weeks of Customer Experience, a customer and community experience blogging project.
SIGNIFICANT PROJECTS
• Redesigned Zendesk’s onboarding experience (in-app new customer experience, 30-day email messaging programming, upsell to Plus+)
• Redesigned Zendesk’s lead generation landing pages, resulting in 5% conversion increase
• Designed Zendesk’s monthly newsletter campaigns including, upsells, coupling, lost lead reactivations, & engagement strategy
• Prototyped a revised knowledge base for Zendesk’s customer advocate, marketing, and product teams, titled “Learning Zendesk”
• Designed editorial style guides for Zendesk, 2tor.com, & Plum TV for use by product marketing, online marketing, customer advocate, & product teams
• Integrated PlumTV & other sites with Facebook’s Open Graph, Twitter, & other APIs
• Implemented community commenting and blogging strategy for Huffington Post that scaled to over 100k posts per day in 2008, implemented community commenting for nymag.com in 2007
• Information architecture for nymag.com/entertainment, The Agenda (entertainment calendar of events), & Vulture blog (now, vulture.com)
• Enhanced a previously stagnant revenue stream for Meetup.com by redesigning the “Step Up Experience” product to reduce group churn when an organizer steps down (resulted in a 20% lift in sales in 2007)
• Designed workflow for Washingtonian.com’s custom content management system with CRM integration
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCES (Organized by Full-Time & Freelance)
FULL-TIME, NYC March 2008 – August 2009
Product Designer, Online Media & Community, Plum TV, March 2008 – July 2009
Developed and implemented 2008 – 2009 web, content, and marketing strategy (in the process of this endeavor, as the economy collapsed, I had to reduce my team from 12 to 1 and lead/execute the day-to-day backend, frontend, and editorial programming).
FREELANCE NYC, March 2007-March 2008
Product Design, Client HuffPost
Developed 2008 – 2009 community strategy to expand offerings with great support from Jonah Peretti, Ken Lehr, Eric Hippeau, Arianna Huffington, and Betsy Johnson, hired & scheduled 20 paid & 20 volunteer moderators for24/7 coverage. Designed/launched HuffPollstrology and Say No! to Pollster’s Petition, Commenting experience (frontend look & feel & backend workflow) & redesigned The Daily Brief, Alerts for all content verticals, & contributed IA across sections of the site.
Product Design, Client Meetup
Managed products in a unique start-up culture of self-organized teams, for a social network that helps millions of people form local community groups. Pitched projects, managed product development from start to finish, and analyzed results. Launched iterative product frequently. Responsible for product announcements and interacting with the site’s avid user base.
Through a series of A/B testing I was able to achieve a 20% lift in sales conversions as well as a 50% difference (1.07% – 2.1%).
Product Design, Client nymag.com
Redesign of nymag.com’s Entertainment section, Agenda, Vulture Blog, & Commenting System
FULL-TIME, Northern Virginia/Washington D.C.
- Sr. Product Designer, The Washingtonian Magazine, January 2006-April 2007
- Product Designer, Publishing Services Air Line Pilot Magazine, December 2004–March 2006
- Product Designer, Fairfax County Public Schools, September 2002 – December 2004
INTERESTING THINGS
2001– 2002 I was the “Outreach & Community Manager” for the September 11 Digital Archive (911digitalarchive.org).
The archive was a challenging start-up project at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media that used electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the history of September 11, 2001.
The subject of my dissertation focuses on stewardesses (1930s – 70s) in George Mason University’s History & New Media doctoral program – blended degree in engineering/computer science and liberal arts curriculum.
