Principal UX Designer · Product Design · Design Systems · Experience Strategy

I Design the Product & Build the Systems around It.

Most of my favorite work crosses lanes. I jump in where I can be most useful: designing the experience directly, untangling a complex decision with the people closest to the problem, or building a structure people can keep using.

Product design: 126-program discovery experience
Design quality system: 3 teams, 16 designers
Portfolio strategy: ~80 touchpoints across 5 teams

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Highlighted Work

I stay close to the product, whether I am shaping an interaction model, testing an information architecture, or helping a team decide what to do next. When the same problems keep surfacing, I build a clearer way to handle them.

ACES Program Explorer Reframed program discovery around how prospective students choose I designed an interest-based Program Explorer that let students start with what interested them, not the college's department structure. The same model supported a focused recruiting view without a second build.

Experience Quality Strategy

Design Quality at Scale

At Walmart, I built practical ways for teams to make stronger design-quality decisions: risk-based review, training shaped by recurring issues, peer champion support, and portfolio prioritization.

As the organization grew, the work gave leaders a clearer view of where deeper support would matter most. It also gave teams a better starting point than routing every question through one specialist.

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How I Work

Design the Experience

I turn complex content, needs, and constraints into clear interaction models, information architecture, and accessible behavior.

Make Quality Practical

I build standards, review paths, and decision tools that help teams catch issues earlier and avoid solving the same problem again.

Build Team Capability

I use coaching, training, shared tools, and clear escalation paths to help people become more capable, not more dependent.

Make Tradeoffs Visible

I bring product, engineering, business, and design into the same conversation when a decision affects the experience, the team, or both.

The Titles Changed. The Job Didn’t.

I have managed a creative team, led a web-development team, and now work as a Principal UX Designer. In each role, I have stayed close to the design work.

At Illinois, I led the College of ACES web team while personally designing every wireframe for the Program Explorer. I also co-chaired the roughly 175-person Web Implementation Guidelines Group and served on its five-person steering committee.

A Point of View on Product Quality

Product quality should not depend on one specialist catching every issue at the end or every team relearning the same lesson.

I treat accessibility as part of how I see quality. It helps teams recognize friction, risk, and gaps in the experience early enough to do something useful about them. The practical work is making ownership clear and giving people a way to act on what they find.

A good system should make the next right decision easier.

About Melissa

I started in graphic design, where I learned how thoughtful communication and visual clarity shape people's experiences.

Over time my work expanded beyond designing interfaces into leading the systems behind them. Today I help organizations strengthen design quality, improve collaboration, build team capability, and create more sustainable ways of working. Accessibility is a major strength in that work, but it isn't the whole story. Whether I'm building training, governance frameworks, or operational processes, I'm motivated by the same goal: helping people do their best work and creating better experiences for the people they serve.

Learn More about Me

Resume

See my experience across UX design, design systems, experience strategy, and team enablement.

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