Product/UX Design & Management
12+ years of focused growth
Entering the 2010s, I found my focus in UX design, both in freelance work and in my career. In 2014 I established the Experience Design team at Northern Arizona University — hiring, forming culture and process, and integrating UX with existing Marketing, IT, Accessibility, and Business units. This User Experience Manager role culminated in a full redesign of the university website, for which I acted as product manager and UX Lead. Beyond design and research, the institution taught me about management, leadership, and long-game diplomacy.
Professional Development for UX Leadership
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ProSci offers a thoughtful system for how to communicate change within and across teams. (ProSci Practitioner Certification, 2019)
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Business and self-help workshop focused on personal responsibility leading to improved relationships. (2019)
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Intensive invitation-only workshop for NAU Supervisors, teaching leadership and management skills. (2017)
Northern Arizona University
When I was first hired to NAU Extended Campuses, the organization (engineering-led as it was) didn’t quite know what to do with a designer, and “UX” was nowhere on the org chart.
By the time I left a decade later, the Experience Design team I founded was working closely with the CTO and CMO and I was giving presentations directly to the President.
a foundation for UX, 2011–2021
2021 Top-level site redesign
I was selected by the CMO to act as product manager and lead UX designer for a full site redesign shipped in 2021. For more than two years, I worked closely with the CTO, CMO, Provost, and the external brand marketing agency leading the visual design.
Scope included:
New information architecture (IA) and visual design for NAU domain
Transition plans toward unification of experience for individual college sites
Transition plans toward new intranet
New strategies for content management
A new degree search tool
A new directory search tool
New tools for viewing and managing information about statewide campuses
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.”
Extended Campuses website design
NAU Extended Campuses (NAU–EC) was in 2013 responsible for the delivery of the university’s online and statewide courses. My leadership of the department site’s visual and functional redesign — to my knowledge, the first responsive department-level website at the university — led to a promotion and increased visibility for our team.
The site featured an all-new degree search tool and a dynamic infrastructure that allowed data about Documents, Stories, Events, Degrees, and Campuses to interconnect and automatically populate data across the site, giving our Marketing staff fantastic new ways to keep content fresh by simply tagging items in their admin tools.
Content tools
In addition to public-facing websites and mobile apps, we dedicated a significant amount of our time to creating administrative tools for faculty and staff across the university to manage data and create content. We worked closely every day with our phenomenal front- and back-end developers.
Product requirements
Data flow
Wireframes
Prototype
Final development
Usability research and iterative design
As UX Lead and Senior UX Designer, I have led my teams to establish qualitative and quantitative usability research processes, the results of which are used (in conjunction with analytics data from our own metrics and external agencies) to make UX design decisions.
At the university we worked closely with internal developers using agile processes, iterating our designs frequently. At DoubleDown our work requires frequent and detailed communication in a waterfall process with our development partners in Korea (for production games) and rapid iteration across our internal teams (for prototypes of new game ideas).
Terri Hayes
Director of Academic Support at NAU
