Resume

At Rite Aid, I started as a UX Designer. It was the first UX role that Rite Aid hired. They were in the process of overhauling their digital experiences. In this initial role I helped them re-platform their website and mobile app with the help of a team at Adobe. It was aimed at modernizing Rite Aid’s digital user experience.

During the second phase of my employment there, I was promoted to a Lead UX role, and was responsible for hiring contract UX professionals and working with agencies as our digital team evolved into a real product team. I successfully launched a number of important features, like Buy Online Pickup in Store which quickly became our customers most popular fulfillment method.

Finally, our team had grown to over a dozen UX professionals, and I was promoted to Senior Manager. In this role I was responsible for all ecommerce user experiences.

Throughout this time, Rite Aid was struggling with a lot of issues behind the scenes. Not all of the projects our team executed ended up shining as much as I think they could have. There were leadership changes, and other adversity. I think this taught me a lot about how to make the best of the resources you have. And despite the outcome, I am proud of the experiences we delivered to our loyal customers.

As a graduate student, I loved taking this class about virtual reality and augmented reality technology. I had the opportunity to help out with it, so I took it!

I loved helping and mentoring my peers. I have always been good at picking up software and other skills quickly, so I end up teaching those skills to others. It was a fun change of pace working in Unity and flexing my coding skills.

I signed on with Bass Pro Shops after they acquired Cabela’s, my previous employer. Cabela’s was a much bigger player in the direct-to-consumer side of the business, so they wanted our expertise!

I had worked with the UX team in my previous role for a number of years, and was was finishing up my Masters Degree, so it was a great time for me to transition to a UX title.

It was a small team, but we packed a big punch. Our ecommerce experiences needed to be condensed into one unified white-label experience, and it was a big challenge. The two sites today are among the top 3 ecommerce retailers in the outdoor sports industry with over $1 Billion in combined annual sales.

At Cabela’s I wore a lot of hats. Primarily, I was responsible for generating marketing materials for a product category (Fishing or Camping, for example). This included weekly category page promotions, marketing HTML emails, special promotion landing pages, content pages for SEO, and customer education, social media ads, etc.

In addition, each of the Interactive Art Directors had responsibility to oversee a marketing category as a secondary task. One example is Marketing Emails. In this role I would research how we could improve our templates, ensure as new browsers and email clients evolved we kept up with sound front-end development techniques.

As this secondary role evolved, I saw an opportunity to work more closely with our UX and Dev teams. We had partnered with them on a number of projects, and there was some hiccups along the way. I pitched this secondary role to our Digital Creative Director, and he set me loose. I met with their teams weekly and reported on what our team was working on, and learned more about their processes and upcoming projects. There was a lot less friction after that, and I gained valuable insight into their world that led me to pursue a Masters Degree in HCI.

Torque Agency was a small marketing agency that operated along side a large regional motorsports dealership who had a large ecommerce presence. We brought on additional clients from snowmobile apparel companies to custom parts fabricators.

Our Agency handled catalog layouts, branding, television/radio ads, all kinds of print ads, vehicle graphics, and digital marketing including multiple websites. With only 4 team members, we did a lot of different things, and the variety was perfect for a recent graduate.

I worked in every medium there, and even designed and installed large wall graphics for an exhibit at the dealership for sport bikes, where the whole area looked like a race track. However, I quickly became the team’s go-to designer for anything digital, and ended up redesigning the home page of our main client’s website.

This was a large retail printing and shipping store. I was fortunate to land a job here while I was attending design school. Working directly with clients, I had the opportunity to develop skills that most designers at my level of experience would not have for some time. I also learned a lot about physical printing techniques, craftmanship, and processes that were very valuable for my performance in art school.

As a graphic designer there, I designed typical print shop products for customers like mailers, outdoor signage, vehicle graphics, business cards, stationary and brochures. I had the occasional branding project, I also did some work on web and other digital marketing.

Once I graduated, I transitioned to full-time as the company expanded to second location, and later after being affected by lay-offs at Torque Agency, they hired me back immediately and I worked for them again for several months while I looked for my next opportunity.

I decided to pursue a Masters Degree after working for some time with Cabela’s UX team. I had a desire to get away from the darker side of marketing, and I found a passion for data and user-centered design. I wanted to help the companies I worked for by making their digital products and experiences easier to use, rather than by pestering users with ads.

I learned to value sound scientific methods and statistical analysis, and learned a variety of approaches to user-centered design and research that I added to my toolkit.

BYU-Idaho was a great experience. Many of my art professors were graduates of ArtCenter College of Design, and they brought that level of education with them.

For the capstone of our BFA program, we each did a two-semester class where we execute one project. For my project, I chose to design and execute a collection of materials to support a team of cyclists at the Courage Classic, a 160 mile charity bike ride in Colorado supporting the Denver Children’s Hospital. It was a team I was a part of called Matt’s Ride. We raised money in honor of my younger brother who had passed away a few years before after a long battle with childhood cancer.

I created a brand, website, jerseys, and print materials to help teammates raise money. We were sponsored by Five Guys, and as a team raised thousands of dollars to support the hospital’s cancer research.