LEADERSHIP
My military background played a crucial role in fostering my confidence as a design leader.
Before transitioning to my design career, I spent five years in the US Navy leading combat aircrews on missions worldwide. These experiences instilled in me the values of follow-through, clear communication, and attention to detail. Applying these principles to design, I've earned respect as a confident, collaborative, and empathetic leader.
I prioritize inclusive, transparent, and collaborative leadership, emphasizing shared ownership and mutual respect rather than top-down directives.
Leaders shoulder the responsibility of furnishing or enabling the development of shared frameworks, principles, standards, and tools essential for their team's success.
I consistently apply my personal design principles to all projects I'm involved in and actively impart these values to the teams I lead.
Intuitive
A product should effortlessly convey its function, leveraging the user's experience and intuition. Ideally, it's self-explanatory.
Collaborative
Design thrives on engagement, not isolation. It serves as a powerful facilitator, bringing together diverse perspectives from users and stakeholders to craft well-honed strategies and solutions.
Iterative
Design is perpetual evolution. Continuously evaluated through user engagement, our work undergoes ongoing refinement, ensuring each iteration surpasses the previous one.
User-centric
At the heart of UX practice lies the advocacy for the end user's perspective. While personal experience and intuition serve as valuable guides, prioritizing the user's viewpoint necessitates firsthand research within the specific context of the problem.
I firmly believe that every design problem requires clear articulation of its rationale, with each design iteration informed by both qualitative and quantitative data.
Lean UX
Generate many ideas as quickly as possible.
Validate early and often, internally and with users.
Iterate and refine quickly based on feedback.
Agile UX
Focus on cross-functional collaboration.
Just enough up-front research to validate ideas and test assumptions.
Define clear MVP.
Build and test (with real users).
Continuously iterate and improve based on qualitative and quantitative inputs.
Double Diamond design process by Design Council
What my colleagues have to say about me.
“Keith is an incredible designer and leader. I was fortunate enough to work with him during our time at Percolate. He has a unique ability to organize, lead, and inspire a team to get things done quickly and effectively under extreme pressures. Keith became the Product Design Director of Percolate during a transitional period in our product direction. We were introducing a new backend infrastructure called Percolate Next, which required us to completely overhaul the products existing user experience. Keith immediately hit the ground running and created execution plans for design and engineering collaboration, established team goals, timelines, testing plans, and coordinated progress sessions with our business team. Keith’s work was instrumental to the successful launch of Percolate Next, which ended up scoring a 5/5 in Gartner’s UX analysis for CMP software for 2018. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from Keith. He makes everyone around him better, and would be a valuable asset as a design leader in any organization!”
“Keith was a pleasure to work with at Nerve. He always had great ideas, communicated clearly, and gave helpful and insightful feedback and input. He was meticulous, yet also open-minded and not at all dogmatic in his approach to design. For these reasons, we are still friends and I still routinely run design ideas by him for critiques and advice.”
“Keith is an exceptional design leader and is awesome to work with. Shortly after joining Percolate, Keith jumped in to lead the design team in taking on an ambitious product redesign. His ability to foster collaboration between teams, set realistic expectations and push the overall design and vision were all imperative to the success of the product redesign. As my manager and mentor, Keith provided helpful and detailed feedback on designs while also giving me the autonomy to produce my best work. This balance created an atmosphere of trust and respect across the team that encouraged collaboration and self-improvement. I would be thrilled to work with Keith again in the future.”
“Keith has a rare combination of formidable creative talent combined with a high degree of professionalism and integrity. I have followed up with him several times since we worked together at Nerve in the hope of using him on other projects and will continue to do so in the future. He is a first-rate creative professional.”
“Keith was a professional, dedicated graphic designer with an eye for detail who took great care and pride in his work. He worked effectively as part of a team responsible for multiple internal and external facing client offerings. Always willing to think “outside the box”, his creative talents helped add that extra professional flair to our products.”