I offer advisory support, consulting participation or fractional team membership with three engagement models:
Diagnostic Assessment
Assess situations, identify root issues, recommend paths forward.
Design leadership
Lead design work on complex initiatives; design direction and cross-functional execution through delivery. This might mean stepping in to lead directly, or partnering with teams to elevate their work and build capability. Can follow diagnosis or be primary engagement when projects need experienced leadership mid-stream.
Strategic partnerships
Ongoing thought partner and facilitator for leaders - navigating strategic decisions, bridging perspectives, improving team effectiveness.
Example engagement scenarios:
When diagnostic assessment is needed
You're stuck and need outside perspective. Initiatives keep stalling, teams are misaligned, a consultancy handoff went wrong, a new leader needs to understand what they inherited, or something's clearly not working but it's unclear what or why.
When design leadership is needed
A complex initiative mid-stream needs experienced guidance. This might be: design concept and technical reality aren't aligned, distributed teams need coordination and creative direction, an early-stage startup needs strategic design direction without a full-time hire, or a project needs someone to step in and lead design work through delivery.
When strategic partnership is needed
Ongoing counsel for navigating complexity. This could be: facilitating decisions across competing perspectives, helping an early-stage company build design capability, improving how teams work together, bridging gaps between functions, or maintaining quality while scaling rapidly.
Why me?
I see both big picture and critical details. I come in with empathy but assess situations clearly. I navigate multiple perspectives - understanding what executives need, what teams are experiencing, and what's actually possible. My goal is to build capability in teams, not only solve immediate problems.
"Jane is the best Design professional I have worked with. Connecting the mission and big picture to the details, while always keeping focused on the customer and user, is challenging for a lot of companies. It takes real skill to navigate those waters and ensure strategy is formulated well, understood, agreed and implemented properly. Jane's ability to see the big picture and know how to get people there makes all the difference."
— Bob, Co-Founder & CTO
"Jane has a fantastic mix of creative vision and attention to detail, and her ability to zoom in and out from high level strategic thinking to down in the weeds execution has been a godsend in our start-up environment. One of the top three hires I have ever made."
— Tim, SVP Product
Broad experience
With more than 25 years working across agencies, corporations and startups, I bring broad experience spanning UX strategy, product and service design, and design leadership. This breadth gives me pattern recognition across different contexts and insight into where things typically break down.
I have designed for:
Product & Service Design
PaaP, SaaS, Mobile, Desktop
Data analytics & scenario forecasting tools
Freemium & Ad-based revenue models
Cross-platform UXs
E-commerce
Consumer & business products
Products for two-sided businesses, B2B+B2C
Component libraries, design systems & UX guidelines
Experiential marcom
More about projects here
case studiies
Every project brings different challenges. Examples:
There was high technical value but slow progress on re-usability, scaling and growth.
Approach
Use a UX framework approach to support business need for custom configurations of growing set of UX modules.
Outcome
Transformed one-off, dispersed project work into re-usable customizable modules and incremental value.
A fast-paced schedule, tight deadlines and under resourced; growing teams led to inconsistencies and compromised usability.
Approach
Introduce a Design System and template UIs.
Outcome
Improved usability, consistency and efficiency.
Changing technical constraints and changing business priorities.
Approach
Applied systems approach to process, created prototype service and modular UX to deliver designs on time.
Outcome
Prevented hold ups in sprint cycles, allowed for changes in direction, achieved with minimal resources.
Work was aligned to company structure rather than the user's experience or business goals leading to growing tech debt and obscured priorities.
Approach
Change silo'd work teams to collaborative goal-oriented project teams. Introduce UX funnel methods to focus work on supporting product goals for user needs.
Outcome
Fixed disjointed UX funnels, provided transparency into tech debt vs goals, enhanced collaborative problem-solving. Aligned competing strategies and identified priorities.
A mismatch between design concept and technical architecture capabilities meant designs were largely unusable but multiple teams were already building and marketing had commited on value prop.
Approach
Reconciled mismatch with: audit, gap analysis, realigned UX strategy, collaborative workshops. Centralized UX design work around a "lead" platform (Android) and de-prioritized designing UX or features where uncertainty still lay.
Outcome
Prevented hold ups for developers and engineering, stayed close to original intent but changed to implementable rather than original "bluesky" product - hit release schedule.
(Contact me for access to more detail on case studies)
deep experience
In addition to my IC work, I also deep experience in the many aspects of managing and ensuring design effectiveness while translating strategy into actionable steps.
Strategic Design Thinking
- Research, quantitative & qualitative
- Identifying primary goals
- Collaborative ideation, prototyping, testing
- Identifying gaps and/or latent needs
- Creating UX strategies
Implementation Planning & Execution
- Defining pilots/MVPs
- Design Ops & Design Systems
- Cross-functional collaboration
- Tracking project metrics
- Design mentoring & IC UX/Ix/UI
Steering & Navigating Change
- Stakeholder collaboration
- Process design
- Team coordination
- Open communication
Strategizing according to product type
- Conversion - UX Funnel Matrices
- Service design - user journeys
- Tools & processes - taskflows
- Finding product fit - MVPs to learn quickly
Ensuring UX best practices are employed
- Consistency in layouts, components & interaction patterns
- Responsiveness
- Usability
- HCI & UX Guidelines
- Accessibility
- The 10 heuristics of Nielsen Norman
Growing & optimizing a product
- Prioritize funnels to conversion/KPIs
- Behavioral data
- Continuous testing
- Build dialogue with users via support & feedback
- Experiment on user segments, A/B testing
New Opportunities & challenges with AI
- Integrate new AI tools into the design process
- UX best practices and Design Systems baked into AI tools for rapid UI generation
- Train AI agents for specific design tasks & help
- Bring UCD principles to AI agent design for correct objectives and good success metrics
- Interaction Design for AI agent communication interfaces
- Design for AI partnership rather than replacement
Project clients include:
