Jason Robinson
𐡷 Curiosity, hospitality & craft 𐡸
Principal UX Designer
Available for remote or hybrid work in the Seattle area.
USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN ▾
12+ years designing user experiences in agency, in-house, enterprise, and freelance contexts — always in close collaboration with devs.
UX RESEARCH & STRATEGY ▾
12 years harmonizing digital tech with human psych. Two-time design/research team founder. MS, Public Interest Technology.
INTERACTION & PROTOTYPING ▾
Formally-trained visual and interaction designer with expertise in rapid prototyping for esponsive web and mobile.
VISUAL DESIGN SYSTEMS ▾
Led UI design and design system implementation for a visual design refresh across 185k web pages at a state university.
User Experience Design
Across 12+ years designing and leading teams — graphic design, interaction, motion, experience — UX has remained at the center. My approach to design prioritizes:
Humane design patterns which respect visitors’ intelligence and intent
Standards and accessibility, serving content with care to as many guests as possible
Iterative, tech-forward collaboration with engineers from the outset
Service Design thinking, recognizing that backstage systems affect guest experience and brand perception
NAU digital 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
While the brand refresh and visual design direction were provided by our partners at Lipman Hearne, I was ultimately responsible for:
Extending the visual design across 40+ key marketing pages, based on my wireframes
Implementing the component-based design system and WordPress content strategy (enhanced by other institutional data sources)
Redesigning the application funnel for prospective students
Redesigning a family of interlocking IA/navigation and site templates in three tiers: a) top-level Marketing pages b) academic Department, College, and Research sites, and c) NAU business units — each with distinct needs
New Degree Search, Directory Search, and backstage administration and CMS tools
My role
1. Research
2. Pitch
3. Cast Vision
4. Plan
5. Design
6. Develop
7. Ship
8. Measure & Iterate
WordPress content strategy
CASE STUDY: Degree Microsites
My team’s UX research turned up something interesting: prospective students were visiting as many as 6 separate NAU websites — often with distinct layouts and navigation — in the process of researching and applying for a degree program. Here’s a real guest’s journey as they researched an NAU nursing degree:
PROBLEM:
Discussions with stakeholders across the institution revealed the political and technical roots of this situation:
Politically, individual offices were responsible for presenting information from their own perspective and according to their own politics, with no unifying story for the prospective student. (Example: This online nursing degree appeared on both the School of Nursing and NAU Online websites, each containing specifics omitted by the other.)
Technically, our catalog data was being served by our PeopleSoft system of record, and (appropriately!) guarded by its data stewards — this is, after all, the data used for accreditation and student records. However, there was no system in place for University Marketing to create content atop this ‘sacred’ data. (Example: During COVID, there was a spike of interest in epidemiology, an area for which NAU is renowned — but Marketing was unable to quickly update degree descriptions to include common SEO terms.)
APPROACH:
A new, dedicated Degree Search tool led visitors to a microsite that pulled together a) accreditation data from PeopleSoft, b) institutional data about tuition and applications, c) degree-specific Marketing copy entered via a new custom WordPress admin tool, d) academic data from the relevant College and School, and e) data from external sources like government jobs databases.
From a single source, prospective students could now find key information about their program — and we could directly guide them to connect with our admissions staff via a prominent Request-for-Info form.
The design is fully responsive, uses a component-based design system, and page generation is automated based on available data.
RESULTS:
Requests-for-Information (our primary KPI) increased by 15% within 3 months of launch, then >40% YoY across the next calendar year.
John Devoy
Vice President of Search and Web Analytics at Kiosk
“Jason [has] … a rare ability to solve complex web UX challenges with clarity. He understands how information architecture, SEO, and content strategy work in harmony to create exceptional user experiences… An ideal teammate in every sense: collaborative, creative, and deeply committed to quality.”
Interaction & Prototyping
At DoubleDown Interactive, I led UX production concept-to-completion on our flagship mobile adventure game and contributed to concepts and prototypes for 10+ other mobile games. Tools include Figma, Balsamiq, Azure, Animate, and Keynote.
Interactive and motion prototypes helped communicate concepts, motion, interaction, and timing to our UI artists and developers.
Interactive campaign for Rolling Stone
The 1,000th issue of Rolling Stone featured a lenticular 3D cover collage of famous rock and pop culture personalities. I designed this interaction, giving readers a sense of what it’s like to hold this historic artifact in hand before making their purchase.
Motion design and prototyping
A proposal for Monte Cook Games, bringing their Tarot-inspired physical “Sooth Deck” to digital life as a native iOS app.
This concept allows quick search and exploration of card imagery, symbolism, and game mechanics and was designed to adhere to both the game’s branding and the Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines for iOS.
(Invisible Sun trade dress: Monte Cook Games)
Visual identity design
The Notion is a fictional tabloid newspaper whose office provides the surreal setting for a 9-part Twitch streaming series focused on themes of truth and lies, darkness and light.
Design work for the show included:
brand guidelines and marks
art direction
web design
flexible broadcast overlays for use in OBS
motion graphics used during the stream
print collateral for use at conventions and live events
Lyric Peate
Lead UX/UI Analyst at NAU (reporting to me)
“Jason lives his life with a magnifying glass in hand; his attention to detail and ability to weave it into the big picture is what makes him a curator of consistently rich and heartfelt experiences.”
UX Research & Strategy
I’ve twice founded successful design and research teams for enterprise and consumer product development — hiring, mentoring, and managing while establishing UX design best practices and research methodologies.
User experience is, for me, the beating heart of design — a synthesis of beauty and function and process and relationship and measurable outcomes.
Stories come from numbers …
Quantitative analysis of player data was key to understanding our players’ experiences at DoubleDown.
During a worldwide beta test of our adventure game Spinning in Space, I produce this visual representation of the game’s player activation funnel to connect player drop-off numbers with narrative, UX, and gameplay beats — which we then used to improve the customer experience.
… but numbers come from people!
At NAU, quantitative analytics revealed the WHAT of our problem — prospective 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
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.”
Visual Design Systems
I’ve built and managed branded design systems for print and web, with pragmatism and scalability in mind. I’ve designed systems using both Figma and Adobe Creative Suite, including shared component libraries, styles, variables, and design tokens.
As a formally-trained graphic designer, my UI work is heavily informed by systemic thinking about visual design principles including hierarchy, typography, color, and motion.
Scalable, component-based design systems
As part of our brand refresh, I oversaw implementation of NAU’s atomic design system and component library across our marketing funnel, business websites (185k+ pages) and internal web applications.
One example: our digital color system — 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, custom WordPress theme, and Material Design stylesheets.
The developer reference shown here gave our designers and engineers a shared language to produce beautiful work and remain on-brand. Each color provides a family of specific values for digital needs like accessible text and UI highlight.
Harlan R. Teller
Chief Marketing Officer, Northern Arizona University
“Jason is a rare individual — a person who has equal measure of creativity and analytical acumen. He is a technologist with the soul of a poet.”
Public Interest Technology
PIT, a relatively new discipline, might be described as “Human-centered design — but for all of society.” As a methodology, it promotes responsible technology development (and successful business) while acknowledging that human good is the highest priority.
My award-winning graduate work on hospitality ethics, for which I led a grant-funded cross-disciplinary team exploring public interest design for consumer XR, was recognized for upholding the institutional value of Access.
Speaking Engagement Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, May 2023
Digital Hospitality: Bridging PIT principles with UX practice
In reflecting on Eastern and Western hospitality practices, we can nurture a deeper understanding of our relationship to “the other” and how the guest–host relationship can inform our product decisions and designcraft.
Building on the writings of ethical philosophers and product designers, I presented a model for folding PIT principles into UX and product design.
Conference on Governance of Emerging Tech and Science
Dr. Erik Fisher
Sr. Global Futures Scientist, Arizona State University