"I solve user experience challenges at the intersection of technology and design using a holistic approach to product development, design operations, and industry-leading expertise in modern web application practices."

Recent Projects Journal

Design System for Caterpillar Earthmoving Machinery Displays

Role: Technical Architect
Situation: The Caterpillar Earthmoving division in-cab display was built using restrictive technologies that didn't allow for responsive design, animations, or on-the-fly styling updates. This led to diminished perception of brand by the end customers and inconsistencies internally between UI/UX division teams able or unable to provide interactive experiences on the displays.
Goal: When the software teams responsible for the in-cab display began to investigate alternative web-based technologies, I was tasked with designing, developing, demonstrating, and evaluating a new UI/UX design system process that would facilitate internal consistency and meet the demands of the customer.
Tools: Azure DevOps, Azure Cloud Web Application Service, CI/CD (Azure Pipeline w/ YAML, bash, Node, various APIs), CSS, Git, HTML, JavaScript, Lit, Markdown, ModernWeb, NPM, Storybook, TypeScript, UXPin, VSCode, VuePress
Impact: As a result of the new process, teams are able to maintain a consistent source of design truth. Web components enable cross-framework code sharing. Continuous testing maintains quality. Documentation ensures clear communication. Direct access to code based components in design based tools such as UXPin allow designers to create prototypes for user research faster than ever before.

Product Stakeholder Relationships

Role: Facilitator
Situation: Each year at Caterpillar the UX team surveyed stakeholders to better understand opportunities for improvement. Communication and general awareness of UX/UI activities with others was an issue.
Action: As a team lead, I conducted regular listening sessions with more than a dozen product groups to gather feedback on their needs and address any questions they may have had. Additionally, I initiated a quarterly newsletter to showcase the achievements and updates of the UX/UI team. Lastly, I facilitated budget estimates to ensure transparency and communicated planning and progress reports to the relevant groups.
Impact: As a result, product groups were overall more satisfied with communication and the newsletter reached further than I expected with compliments and appreciation from leadership and management.

Onboarding Materials for New Employees

Role: Learning Coordinator & Instructional Designer
Situation: With increased budget and more projects than ever before, our UX/UI team at Caterpillar grew more than double. Existing onboarding materials were scattered between powerpoints and spreadsheets. New folks were confused and had a lot of questions.
Action: As team lead, I created a shared resource library on a Miro whiteboard where new team members could learn more about general information such as where to get IT help or how to track their hours. In addition there were sections for each of the roles on the team, our project management style, our design system, and the products that we work on.
Process: I also opened up the onboarding resource to existing team members to proof-read and add their own tips and tricks empowering the team to learn from each other.
Impact: By implementing the new onboarding process, incoming team members were able to acclimate to their roles more quickly and easily. As a result, they required less guidance and clarification, as many resources such as links and explanations were already available.

Agile Development Practices

Role: Azure DevOps Admin & Project Management
Situation: When our design and development teams wanted to adopt agile best practices, the Caterpillar enterprise recommended Azure DevOps tooling, but no one on the team had agile training.
Action: Because I was interested in growing my skillset, I took an agile best practices class from the Harvard Extension School as well as additional internal Caterpillar training to learn more about the Azure DevOps tool, project manangement, Scrum, and other methodologies.
Process: As our team DevOps admin, I set up wikis, dashboards, queries, teams, boards, specialized card types, addons, repos, service connections, CI/CD pipelines, and package libraries. As team lead, I lead morning standups, sprint prioritization, points discussions, planning, and retrospectives.
Impact: As a result, the team was able to complete work on time, and team members found the retrospectives and standups helpful as they could share their frustrations and get assistance. Additionally, the pipelines significantly improved the quality and speed of product development.

Design System Documentation

Role: Writer & Static Site Developer
Situation: When I started working at Caterpillar, the UX team didn't have a documentation website. The documentation that did exist was scattered between folders and file structures within Word documents and PowerPoints.
Action: I volunteered to take on the challenge and create a design system documentation that would include foundational style choices, components, experience guidelines, and other helpful resources.
Process: I built two documentation websites, one for each version of design system, using markdown via VuePress. This allowed for the sites to be fully customizable and version controlled via git. We were also able to use Azure DevOps wiki as a quick way to edit the files and drag and drop imagery. In addition to the documentation websites, I also worked to set up our developer Storybook website as well which included more developer-focused documentation.
Impact: Overall, the documentation websites were a success and users were able to find the information that they were looking for quickly.