Resume

Department of Veterans Affairs

Senior UX Designer and Information Architect,
My HealtheVet on VA.gov
Contractor: Ad Hoc LLC / Washington, D.C. (remote)
Jul. 2023-present

• Collaborate with a broad landscape of government stakeholders to strategize the information architecture (IA) plan for a large-scale and multi-year phased migration and expansion of the VA’s patient-facing health portal known as My HealtheVet.

• Plan, research, and design navigation for the overarching health portal, and partner with product teams to concept in-product tertiary navigation.

• Lead a growing portfolio of 8+ product teams in developing recommendations for key aspects of the My HealtheVet UX/IA strategy, including: authenticated experience design principles, access and routing, product search, personalization strategy, and wayfinding.

• Conduct design reviews, audits, and presentations, using past experiences in design system governance to drive continuous improvement and innovation.

• Develop skills in mentorship and coaching, leading tasking efforts to support delivery and team development and helping individuals grow professionally.

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Senior Information Architect,
VA.gov Design Systems Governance
Contractor: Ad Hoc LLC / Washington, D.C. (remote)
Oct. 2022-Jul. 2023

• Governed design system IA standards for 50+ teams that build Veteran-facing products on VA.gov.

• Introduced and led a strategic initiative to redesign the VA’s experience standards, which are criteria that the VA’s platform governance team (and government stakeholders) use to determine a product’s readiness for launch. This redesign brought the count of standards down from 91 overly technical standards that were difficult to report on, to 22 user-focused standards that overhauled how the team provides feedback and reports metrics on the product health of VA.gov.

• Participated as a member of the VA’s Design System Council, evaluating components, patterns, and updates to the design system via the VA’s experimental design process.

International Trade Administration

UX Researcher and Program Specialist
Express Leads pilot program
Contractor: GovWizely / Washington, D.C. (remote)
Sep. 2020-Mar. 2022

• Working in the Office of Digital Strategy and Engagement (ODSE) I co-managed a pilot program called Express Leads, which leveraged existing technology to quickly notify U.S. businesses about verified international trade opportunities. The goal was to get leads in front of them at earlier stages in the RFP process and in a more user-friendly, actionable manner.

• Conducted multi-method user research, including moderated remote interviews with U.S. businesses, small group feedback sessions, surveys to gain user insights; and synthesized learning outcomes from research into training documents and artifacts (such as customer personas and journey maps)

• Analyzed opportunities for technical automation on the pilot program, and contributed to product design planning sessions to strategize scaling the solution to new continents and trade sectors.

GoNoodle

Metadata Consultant / Nashville, TN
May 2021-Jul. 2021

• Planned and managed data consolidation effort from multiple legacy systems into a streamlined new resource library that supported an extensive site redesign.

• Built data dictionary, advised on taxonomy, and mapped distributed metadata from a previous tagging system to high fidelity custom JSON schema that incorporated industry best practices.

• Crafted a report and provided insights & recommended actions for future data planning and ontology development to the product management team.

Vanderbilt University

Head of Exhibitions and Outreach
Special Collections Library / Nashville, TN
Sep. 2017 - Nov. 2018

• Worked cross-functionally with key university partners to strategize around new processes and strategic outreach initiatives to improve engagement and interaction with exhibitions and grow publicity to expand funding for library initiatives.

• Led research with library visitors and university stakeholders to solicit feedback and synthesize it into actionable insights, whereby we learned that the community wanted a higher volume of exhibits on a wider variety of topics annually.

• Conducted strategic planning exercises and quarterly timeline development to operationalize the exhibit development process, which allowed us to triple exhibit output (from 3 to 10 shows a year) and led to donor engagement and program endowment expansion from $500k to $3 million.

• Provided curatorial talks and instructional sessions utilizing special collections materials to teach curatorial skills to wide ranging groups of visiting curators, from seasoned faculty to undergraduate students.

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Digital Projects Librarian
Vanderbilt Libraries / Nashville, TN
Aug. 2013-Aug. 2017

• Created and managed the long-term sustainability plan for digital assets from the Special Collections Library’s digitization outputs, including adopting XML schemas and database management plans, and a data governance model.

• Developed sustainable processes and university support for metadata creation within the library ecosystem, as well as for migrating legacy digital projects.

• Cataloged the special collections library’s rare materials.

• Served on several cross-functional task forces on schema development and data infrastructure needs for the university.

• Curated and designed physical and online exhibitions.