Jason Robinson

UX Designer

Available for full-time work onsite in Seattle, WA.

UX DESIGN & PROTOTYPING ▾
10+ years aligning product vision with business strategy and backstage process — keeping hospitality always in mind.

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USER RESEARCH ▾
5+ years managing teams; I’ve founded two UX design and research teams (for enterprise and consumer products).

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GAMES INDUSTRY EXPERIENCE ▾
Led design and implementation of an extensive digital design system across web and mobile at a state university.

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ENABLING CONTENT CREATORS ▾
With 6 years in games UX, I’m captivated by play spanning physical and digital — including grad work in AR design for public spaces.

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Download Résumé

▴ Table of Contents

— 10+ years —

UX Design & Prototyping

Product thinking is alignment — of guest experience with business objectives, of brand values with backstage processes, of future plans with present realities. I thrive when I have the opportunity to:

Cast vision among cross-functional teams and upward to leadership
Procure data, from qualitative and quantitative research with real users/players
Iterate relentlessly, in close collaboration with developers and other designers
Think holistically, using a service design model to seek alignment

NAU enterprise redesign

I was selected by NAU’s CMO and CIO as Product Manager and Lead UX Designer for a comprehensive visual & functional redesign of NAU’s customer experience across web and mobile:

Gathered 6 cross-functional teams around my vision — including design, engineering, marketing, and accessibility
Presented regularly to President and stakeholders, relying on Change Management strategies to build consensus
Website and apps serve 30k+ students and staff, plus prospective students, alumni, researchers, and others

Primary KPI request-for-information traffic showed a > 40% increase year-over-year after the launch of the new site.

Ann Marie deWees
Associate Vice President of Marketing at NAU:

“Jason’s reputation at NAU is stellar. He has a brilliant mind, a creative approach to his work, and a heartfelt way of engaging with others. He has the ear of NAU’s CTO, CMO, and President, and the respect of his team and his colleagues.”

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— 10+ years, with 5 managing —

UX Design/Research

As a two-time design team founder, I’ve learned to invest deeply in people and process.

Mentoring, listening, and building trust are as important to long-term maturity and team success as establishing design practices or business processes.

I’m also a skilled designer — a decade of production work across visual, motion, interaction, and UX/UI work allow me to lead and delegate or take on design work as required by the project.

Research-driven iteration

Quantitative analytics revealed the WHAT of our problem — prospective NAU students were not seeking more information — but not the WHY. Seeking a qualitative understanding, I created a plan for interviews and task-based usability studies across key groups of prospective students (freshmen, grad students, online adult learners).

Sitting with real people gives rich context to the hard numbers — motivations, frictions, delights.

One insight: guests who were interested in NAU but not yet ready to apply had no clear path to follow.

The “APPLY” button felt like a hard commitment rather than an invitation to explore

The “Admissions” menu didn’t have obvious meaning to potential freshman who haven’t spent time in higher ed
The “Info for…” menu was largely invisible to visitors
Many UI items (like “Give”, targeted to alumni) are irrelevant to this audience and add noise

I designed the new nau.edu menu navigation in direct response to the feedback we received, keeping prospective students at the forefront according to business goals:

“How to Apply” created a much more comfortable place to begin exploration

A dropdown menu immediately helps guests with higher ed experience (like prospective grad students) self-sort and get to the information they need
Language across the UI is addressed to the guest rather than reflecting the politics of the institution: “Paying for College” rather than “Admissions > Tuition & Financial Aid”
Prominence of navigational elements for other audiences (like Alumni) are diminished, but still discoverable

Harlan R. Teller
Chief Marketing Officer, Northern Arizona University

“Jason [has]… a unique range of skills… along with the high degree of emotional intelligence required to motivate people and stimulate their best efforts…”

Photo of Harlan Teller, a smiling man with a neatly-trimmed gray beard. He wears a suit. Pine trees are visible in the background.

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Design Systems

I’ve built and managed branded design systems for print and web, with pragmatism and scalability in mind. I’m familiar with Adobe CC and Figma, including shared component libraries, styles, variables, and design tokens.

As a formally-trained graphic and interaction designer, my UI work is heavily informed by systemic thinking about visual design principles including hierarchy, typography, color, and motion.

A scalable design system for a digital brand refresh

I oversaw implementation of NAU’s atomic design system and component library across our marketing funnel, business websites (185k+ pages) and mobile apps.

I designed our digital color system as part of the rebrand — the existing palette had been designed for print, without modularity, accessibility, or display viewing in mind.

I worked closely with our brand marketing, design, accessibility, and engineering teams. The new palette enforced AAA compliance with WCAG color contrast guidelines and encouraged usage by integrating directly with our shared design libraries and Material Design stylesheets.

Mobile interaction guides

At DoubleDown Interactive, I led UX production concept-to-completion on our flagship mobile adventure game, creating design specifications for layout, motion, and interaction to unify disparate features and screens across the app.

My updated standards upheld best practices for mobile — for example, ensuring one-thumb reachability for most common actions — and included Confluence documentation specifying not only the “what” by the “why” for our UI Artists and developers.

Ian Smith
Game Design Manager at DoubleDown Interactive

“The deep thinking [Jason] has done about the nature of play is evident in both his designs and in collaborative discussions.

Jason has … served as the de facto voice of UX for our studio and mentored the two junior UX designers we have hired since his arrival… [but] his greatest strengths lie in his compassion and empathy…”

Photo of Ian Smith: A smiling person with blocky glasses and short curly hair.

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Adventures & Games

Long before I started making games professionally, I’ve been captivated by the play-spaces where physical and digital overlap. For my undergrad capstone, I studied the (then-recent) emergence of transmedia, alternate-reality, and location-based gaming (including geocaching!).

More recently, I have:

Completed a Masters focused on the ethics of product design for consumer AR
Hosted & produced a podcast about modern gaming & storytelling
Researched and pitched an original location-based mobile game at DoubleDown Interactive

AR storytelling (using elevators)

As part of my Masters work in Public Interest Tech, I led “Elevate AR,” a grant-funded, cross-disciplinary team of undergrad and graduate students exploring the engineering, design, narrative, and ethical considerations of design for XR experiences in public spaces.

Our ARKit prototype tested the feasibility of using an elevator’s physical control panel to control digital experiences — thinking, too, from the perspective of bystanders using this shared (and intimate) space.

Design for community games in public spaces

My 2022 Masters in Public Interest Technology (which won an award for upholding “Access”) focuses on:

Hospitality as approach to human-centered product design
Extended Reality for consumer contexts

“Care for Reality: Ethical design for public Augmented Reality experiences” proposes a framework for ethical design in a context where the needs of not only the wearer, but the bystander, need to be considered.

(Geocaching, like other location-based games, has a long history of work in this space!) +1 (646) 256-9059