Senior Designer
The original homepage design for Sears Mobile (after the initial redesign which began in Jan. 2013) contained a single large carousel of promotions, a single small carousel of promotions, and a smattering of products. Upon conversion of the site into an improved look and feel utilizing flat methodology, I worked with a small team to help manifest a greatly improved vision for the homepage. Personalization became a major factor in the updated design, including the direct targeting of products which were intimately tied to a customer’s desires. Multiple new avenues of content were made available including a visual navigation, application download links, ZIP Code localization for print circulars, and more. Customer engagement with the homepage increased, as did customer (and therein business) satisfaction.
Senior Designer
Search, being a primary feature of the Sears.com ecosystem, demands intense scrutinty by both design and UX. Working with research to discover the best practices for our specific user base I worked with a small team to create a design that meat customer goals for information delivery while simultaneously ensuring that on-screen content was neither overwhelming nor jam packed. The result was a set of clean and well designed options for Search that brought information for the forefront, made confusion non-existant, and supported our customers on every step of the way.
Senior Designer
Layaway is a beast that few retailers tackle, and even fewer accomplish with finesse. At Sears, Layaway used to be a laborious process which involved in-store engagement, a heinous set of forms and protocols, and remained both clunky and unintuitive. When Layaway came to Sears Mobile, myself and a small team saught to change that. I worked hand-in-hand with a Senior UXA to manifest a powerful vision for the future of Sears Layaway that could extend far beyond the mobile platform. Leveraging the latest in mobile visual conventions we strove to remove red tape, obliterate obsolete visual restrictions, and create an experience that was delightful and welcoming to our users. The result was a series of interactions that caused customers to find Sears Layaway not only powerful but also welcoming, sharing it with others and increasing customer transactions both immediately and into the future.
Senior Designer
I created and maintained the Sears Asset Library for years while working at Sears. It initially began as a single-source file for assets I created to speed up and solidify my personal work at Sears. As I began to share this asset with fellow designers my manager capitalized on my desire to create a seamless, single system and asked me to create and maintain a style guide and asset library for designers across Sears mobile and desktop. Over time I found myself as the single designer on a team of three in charge of maintaining and gate-keeping UI patterns used by the company on desktop, and mobile, from tablet to phone.
Senior Designer
Upon the launch, and subsequent increased confidence in the Sears Mobile application redesign, business endeavored to increase the market share of the application via a promotional campaign that would launch on both desktop and mobile phones for Sears and Kmart. Working with a small team, invested stakeholders, and on a tight deadline, I worked to design a page that was elegant and smooth, yet contained multiple powerful data points for customer engagement via interest drivers. By showcasing our application in a variety of device shells, orientations, and OS constraints I strove to ensure that a customer never felt like their phone (whether it be powerful or antiquated) would be ill-suited for the new, robust application. The result was a powerfully designed page that drove increased conversion on app installations, and therein increased engagement from customers which lead to more sales.
Senior Designer
As an owner and early adopter of Google Glass I was personally asked to create a presentation to showcase ways in which Glass & Sears could integrate in stores. The resulting presentation was created from the perspective of a user wearing Google Glass, and showcased automatic messaging for in-store deals, product recognition to pull up additional information, on-device location awareness to summon a store associate for assistance, and heads up mapping for ease of store navigation.
Senior Designer
Over the years, numerous business units and brand retailers within Sears created and implemented countless badges for products sold within the site. Everything from "Energy Star" to "New" would appear over a product image, often with a different treatment on each appearance. The resulting clutter became so intense that a project was initiated to begin to sort through the noise and find a consistent UI element which could be utilized across products, brands, and business units.
Creative Lead
The home services industry is vast, poorly marketed, and often confusing. Individuals still do not trust someone they find online to come into their house, even if they are there, to fix an appliance. Thankfully, Sears has the tactical advantage in that our Home Services brand is part of a trusted, long term company. Frustratingly, the website for that brand was antiquated, making the brand and it’s offerings appear untrustworthy. I was hand picked to work with a single Senior UXA to completely redesign the Sears Home Services experience from the ground up. Beginning with a utilization of the new branding that Sears was transitioning to at the time, we created pages and interfaces that were modernized, utilized touch-friendly design (for tablet users), brought the information and content to the forefront. While the client didn’t immediately jump at the concept, it was proven successful over a year later when subsequent testing of the base concepts were utilized by the team and found to be more successful than the current designs across the board. The result was an improved web experience for our customers, resulting in more business and greater respect for the Sears Home Services brand.
Creative Lead
Upon the successful pitch of the Sears Home Services redesign, a request for work was placed in order to manifest the pitch after changes were implemented based on business feedback. Through a series of work that involved customer studies, competitive analysis, and market research, myself and a small team developed a set of design patterns and guides which embodied the spirit of the redesign pitch while also meeting business needs and management’s personal wishes. Further, I lead and mentored multiple designers who were working on this project under me, helping to ensure a cohesive vision while also inspiring their own unique visual creativity. As noted in that redesign pitch, while the client didn’t immediately jump at the concept, it was proven successful over a year later when subsequent testing of the base concepts were utilized by the team and found to be more successful than the current designs across the board. The result was an improved web experience for our customers, resulting in more business and greater respect for the Sears Home Services brand.
Creative Lead
The Sears Home Services redesign was so extensive and massive that it ended up being a complete overhaul of the look & feel for their web property. I was asked to lead multiple designers in creating new assets using the new styles I helped design, and therein also sought me to create and maintain a style library for the new patterns and interface design. The result was a powerful and cohesive deck of visuals that encompassed the full spectrum of design patterns being implemented by the team that I was helping direct and mentor on the creation of the new look and feel for the experience.
Senior Designer
Over the years I was regularly asked to create innovative, clean, and delightful animations for UI components within Sears. Additionally, animations would occasionally need to be created to better explain an idea to business stakeholders, product partners, outside vendors, or the development team.
Senior Designer
Sears is well known as a cornerstone for lifelong endeavors such as marriage, home ownership, and more. To emphasize this, I was pulled into a small team in order to design a powerful visual experience that showcased a wealth of content that lived on Manage My Life (a Sears Holdings company) which could help individuals who were going through some of the multiple life events that Sears is known to cater to. I worked directly with a Senior UXA to create visually impactful designs that harnessed the creativity and power of our site’s content while also leveraging the emotional state of the life event in focus; all without breaking away from a single cohesive experience. Bringing photography and articles to the forefront, the designs sought to emphasize that Sears was more than just a big-box store, and could help out in multiple aspects of a person’s life. The result was a robust site full of frequently updated content that drove users to engage with us, and our products, in a way that saw increased customer conversions and brand loyalty.
Creative Director
Sigilwood and Potionwood posed unique design problems being sister sites with vastly different content. For one, a customer needed to understand that the approach was for any who needed it’s services. For the other, a customer needed to realize that the content was for a more elite set of clientele. The result was a set of paired designs that maintained their own unique look and feel, but resonated with the overarching audience in a professional, clean, and robust way.
Senior Designer
When Kmart sought to creating a gaming site for the emerging and thriving gamer market, they wanted to do so in a way that was engaging, fun, and timely. I was picked to work on a small team to create visual assets, and an environmental look & feel, for a 8bit style flash game similar to a common platformer like Mario while the other designer was tasked with character generation. Utilizing currently trending memes, the visual inspiration of some of the most iconic 8bit games, and a flair for parody, I worked to create designs which were both bright, playful, and matched the Kmart brand pallet. The end result was a short flash game that inspired visits by customers new and returning and drove engagement which lead to further product conversion.
Senior Designer
Presentations, in my opinion, are about ensuring to get an idea across. When visuals do not exist for the idea, and the concept is nothing but a strong passion to get approval to move onto the next step, a presentation should not stand in the way of the presenter. Eye contact, enlivened speaking, and a flair for the dramatic is necessary in order to convey a point. A presentation that is full of words, statistics, and diagrams not only drains the life from a room, but suck a presentation such as this dry. Hence, I was selected to be the sole designer on a pitch deck for the Sears CEO that would help push Kmart into a new realm of product and marketing via Kmart Garden Club. By creating a simple set of visuals that a presenter could speak to, rather than read from. The result was that the presenter used this content to wow the CEO, and later caused intense engagement with the concept of Kmart Garden Club which allowed further investigation to occur.
Creative Lead
Search for a website such as Sears is paramount. Nearly all traffic and end conversion that is seen is driven directly through Search. It is no wonder, then, that when Sears was looking to improve Search they sought a powerful redesign. I was sought to work directly with a Senior UXA to create a powerful, clean, and robust interface that allowed customers to easily and seemlessly navigate the full scope of Sears.com offerings without creating walled off / hybrid experiences that didn’t relate back to the overall picture of a single department store mentatlity. The result was increased engagement in our search result pages, faster load times, and an uptick in conversions that began via Search.
Having a unique format and style for our wedding (via a Handfasting) it was agreed that we needed to create a visual design that showcased this blend of old-and-new, traditional-and-modern. The end product was a series of materials that ranged from postcards for RSVP, handbills for day-of information, and thank you notes for those who gave us gifts. Each of them, including even our social networking platforms, utilized the brand style that was created for our handfasting - resulting in a cohesive and powerful single-source location for all information (and layout of that information) for our special day.
Senior Designer
The Manage My Life brand frequently strove to show their customers that they were adding ever robust content that was frequently seasonal and dynamic. As a result, I was personally selected to work on increasing their brand presence across the web. Working with the client, and their visual assets, I strove to bring forth the brand to the forefront by adding it to numerous renditions of their standard circle-mark while maintaining brand cohesion throughout the designs. The result was increased engagement whenever the new content would go live and improved customer loyalty.
Senior Designer
The Sears Gift Card experience on it’s site was massively outdated and greatly in need of an overhaul. Working under extremely restrictive business goals I engaged a small team to help create a design that brought forth the card designs to the forefront, helped illustrate the breadth of offerings that both Sears and Kmart had, and simplified the process for card selection and checkout as much as possible. The result was increased customer conversion on both frequency of purchased cards as well as amounts purchased on those cards.
Senior Designer
Emails are a huge part of the Manage My Life engagement lifecycle, and always helped to drive return visits by loyal customers. Sadly, their designs rarely matched with the design of the experience on their site. A result was often a jarring and disjointed customer experience that left a user unsure which direction the company was moving in and caused trust to waver. I was hand-picked by the client to work on creating a new and compelling design for the email system that would work to revolutionize engagement. Working directly with the customer personas I strove to create a design that was lightweight, matched the current interface, and let the content shine (rather than weighing the email down with a heavy interface). The end result was a net growth in email open rates and customer engagement across the board that led to a positive lift in return visits, both by people reading the emails and those who had only heard (through association) of Manage My Life.
Senior Designer
Within Sears there is a B2B solution called Shop Your Way Partner Program that seeks to help other businesses engage with Sears customers in a way that is proactive towards both of parties. When their web portal needed to be created, I was brought into a small team in order to help create a cohesive web look & feel that would be open, engaging, touch-friendly, and welcoming. This way, no matter what skill level a vendor might have (from tech savvy to tech newbie) the website remained welcoming, inviting, and easy to use. The result was massively increased engagement in vendor interactions, and a flood of positive feedback from retailers for creating a best-in-class experience.
Senior Designer
Albertsons came to Critical Mass with a unique dilemma: how can we message the current location within the site to the customer, without overwhelming them with an extensive UI. The initial solution, proposed by the Art Director at the time, sought to utilize a series of interconnected drop down boxes that helped to illustrate the location to the user. Seeing this solution as adequate, I sought to improve upon it. I brainstormed several solutions privately and returned to my Art Director and Creative Director with the solution noted above. Both of them had high confidence that it would succeed, even though the client had already been shown the previous option. When presented to the client, the result was an overwhelming “yes” and the designs were implemented and caused increased engagement (and ease of use) across the board.
Senior Designer
Being a teen-social site, eSpin often required attention grabbing content in order to truly entice it’s users to both stay on board and attract new customers. Having a successful email campaign was one of the strongest driver for this tweens company, so I worked directly with the eSpin CEO to ensure that each weekly email was unique, brilliant, bold, and beautiful. Additionally, I sought to ensure that the latest internet trends (as seen in the “ORLY?” owl) were utilized in order to help the target audience feel included as part of the conversation. The result was high open rates and engagements on email campaigns,
Senior Designer
As many in the retail industry are aware, the Holiday Season is often one that can overwhelm any retailer. This is true online as well as offline, with many websites ramping up their server capacity at (and around) events such as Black Friday. Sears, one year, had a catastrophic event wherein the customer interest far exceeded server capacity and the site was incapacitated for several peak selling hours. As a result, millions in sales were lost. The following year, I was enlisted to help solve this problem by creating a page that would display to customers in the event that the site was inaccessable. Thankfully, due to improved server infrastructure, this page was never seen by a single customer. Had it been, though, they would have known that they were next in line to access the site, and that shopping in-store was only a few blocks away.
Creative Director of Visual Design
Terra Mysterium holds a unique place in the Chicago theatrical market of one that embodies a stage presence that presents storytelling via the medium of mythopoesis manifest as ritual-theatre. Their Mandagore performance embodied victorian values in it’s performance, and therein required a visual appearance to match. I worked directly with the cast, crew, and CEO to design and produce a full set of materials from pre-performance to in-house posters. Each cast member had a poster created for them, post cards were created to help promote the performance, and a pair of signs were even created to denote which bathrooms were in (or out) of use during the performance. The result was a visually cohesive theme that spanned multiple mediums and both enthralled and delighted audiences both before, during, and after the performances.
Creative Director
The Brotherhood of the Phoenix approached me to act as creative director in charge of the entirety of their visual presence in print, on the web, and beyond. I worked with their core principles and beliefs (which included a focus on mens’ work, masculinity, and nature philosophy) to manifest a dynamic logo which incorporated their multi-teired symbol set (such as a 7 pointed star and phoenix) as well as print and web promotional materials that embodied their message in a way that would directly captivate and enthrall their target, nature enthusiast, male audience while maintaining a consideration for their requirements for excessive text blocks and a lack of human centric imagery. The result was a set of imagery and branding that solidified their place in the Chicagoland market and have helped them gain international recognition within their subculture.
