Multidisciplinary interaction designer, service designer, and leader with a focus on accessibility, inclusion, and harm reduction. Seeks remote work with potential for positive social, environmental, and/or scientific impact. Wants to live in the Star Trek future, not the Blade Runner one.

Experience

• Managed the entire product roadmap, user research pipeline, all product and service design tasks, and customer experience team until the company’s dissolution in April 2022
• Provided human-centered design education to executive team
• Served as primary point of contact for partner organizations contributing to our FOSS platform
• Supervised student research projects and individual open source community contributions
• Post-dissolution, continued to mentor students through research projects as needed

• Led the design of three student- and educator-facing products. Directly managed other designers.
• Served as the “Accessibility Czar” on Chegg’s design system committee
• Mentored junior designers; conducted prototyping workshops; spoke at internal conferences
• Facilitated the integration of UX into Agile development processes across multiple teams
• Wrote job descriptions, led evaluation and hiring of UX design candidates

• Developed and documented StudyBlue’s interaction design language
• Defined and implemented StudyBlue’s user research process: question definition, experiment design, participant recruitment, synthesis. Trained design team in research fundamentals.
• Owned UX for StudyBlue’s “learning tools” division (anything directly involved in the user’s experience of creating and studying content)

• Owned UX for the “investor” side of this P2P lending platform: conduct qualitative research together with dedicated researchers to inform design decisions and further quantitative research
• Architected, wireframed, and prototyped flows for Prosper’s responsive web app
• Served as scrum master on a cross-functional team of developers, designers, and researchers
• Trained product managers in agile backlog management and integrating UX research into sprints

• Conducted foundational user research on hyper-local crop-swap communities
• Prototyped early versions to gather user feedback and discover pain points before development
• Developed domain-driven design guidelines, providing a conceptual framework for engineers to understand, architect, and implement scalable solutions for the urban agriculture space

• Produced storyboards, information architecture docs, wireframes, comps, UI copy, and prototypes
• Conducted qualitative user research using formal and informal methods

• Coordinated iterative improvements on aging physical security systems
• Designed student-facing services for receiving safe transit to, from, and around campus at night

• Managed 170 part-time workers: hiring/background checks, training, scheduling, payroll, performance evaluations, disciplinary measures, and mentorship
• Designed and developed a fully automated employment application pipeline for the department

• Produced informational videos about education policy reform initiatives for Rep. George Miller (CA-7) and congressional allies.

Education

Intensive, project-based course covering a smorgasbord of current web technologies, which I’ll forego listing here lest the algorithms miscategorize me as a developer. In summary, I can code. You can see some of my projects at github.com/lshillman.

Focused on HCI research methods. Thesis defended with distinction: User-Centered Design in Virtual World Interfaces: A Human Factors Perspective on Third-Party Second Life Viewers

Skills

Design: information architecture, service design, flowcharts, service diagrams, wireframes, rapid prototyping, design systems, design sprints, visual accessibility, semantic accessibility, WCAG, a11y, ethical design, premortems, Black Mirror brainstorms. Tools: Axure RP, Adobe CS, Figma, Excel, VS Code

Research: stakeholder mapping, requirements analysis, literature reviews, ethnography, structured interviews, unstructured interviews, surveys, usability testing, RITE testing, basic statistical analysis, A/B testing, SWOT analysis

Process / Management: agile, scrum, lean UX, project management, time estimation, tradeoff navigation, mentorship, communication, writing, maintaining playful curiosity while analyzing problems through a critical lens