Professional Skills

  • Design Thinking: seeing both “big-picture” and the puzzle pieces

  • Experienced, effective remote worker

  • Adept, articulate speaker and presenter
    (former professional actor / voice actor singer)

  • Highly creative, innovative thinker
    (“How would we do this if anything were possible?!”)

  • Skilled user researcher, always user-focused

  • Process improvement advocate

  • Familiar with, and experienced in, a wide variety of project methodologies (Agile, Waterfall, Hybrid, and others)

Design Skills

  • Certified in Design Thinking, experienced in Stanford, IDEO, and conventional “Double Diamond” models

  • Branding, Persona, and “Grice Maxim Model” conversation design

  • Comfortable, collaborative, and effective design team lead

  • Experienced and effective teacher and mentor
    (—and I genuinely enjoy it!)

  • Experience across multiple modalities
    (Voice-only, voice-forward, text, chatbot, Visual IVR)

  • Conversational AI

  • Lemmitization and semantic tagging

  • Broad conversation design experience in multiple verticals
    (Finance, Healthcare, Travel / Hospitality, Entertainment, Transportation,Transit, Utilities)

“You Just Never Know…” Skills

  • Conversation Data Analysis, heuristic evaluation, qualitative research

  • Former professional actor, voice actor, singer (opera / musical theatre) and instrumentalist (piano, tuba, trombone, bassoon)

  • Published and performed composer / arranger

  • Dual-citizen (Canada / USA), can travel

  • Intermediate-level Spanish (speak, read, write)

  • Beginning-level Irish (speak, read)

Experience

Principal Conversation Strategis (2022 - Present)
Blink UX, Remote [Seattle, WA]

  • Provide Conversational Strategy and Design consulting services to clients using industry-leading Conversational AI bot-building tool

  • Spearhead conversational design efforts for leading American financial services firm (multi-year, $1M+ project)

  • Advanced conversation design, prompt engineering, and audio-output prosody tuning using Advanced SSML

  • Mentor and train junior designers, provide peer review and editing, train end-user customers on the Kore AI tool suite

  • Create and implement new, fully functional Conversation Strategy practice, including tools, processes, protocols, Best Practices, templates, pre-sales materials, and AI guidelines

Senior Voice User Experience Designer (2021 - 2022)
Optum Rx / United Health Group, Remote [Seattle, WA]

  • Create, implement, and lead a newly established Conversation Design practice for a Fortune 5 company’s mail-order pharmacy business.

  • Design conversational interfaces across multiple modalities (Voice, SMS, Visual IVR, Web)

  • Mentor junior designers, train and educate co-workers on Conversation Design Best Practices, establish Design process, protocol, and methods

Principal User Experience Designer (2018 - 2020)
Voxai Solutions, Inc., Remote [Seattle, WA]

  • Principal voice interface and user experience designer for the world’s largest postal delivery agency, handling hundreds of thousands of daily calls

  • Educate stakeholders on conversational Best Practices (theoretical and practical)

  • Conversational design for voice, chat, text, web, Visual IVR

Principal Voice Interface Designer (2018)
Nuance Communications (now part of Microsoft), Seattle, WA

  • Design and strategizing for IVR products ranging from Fortune 500 clients to small-business call directors

  • Mentor junior designers, with an eye toward industry Best Practices

  • Strategize for audience segmentation and optimal design effectiveness across all channels

  • Extensive use of Nuance Design Suite tools and techniques

Principal Speech Solutions Architect (2013 - 2016)
Interactive Intelligence (now part of Genesys), Remote [Millbrae, CA]

  • Design-team leadership in creating state-of-the-art VUI solutions for Fortune 500 client companies. Create, establish, and lead a Conversational Design practice for a company known for leading-edge contact centre technology.

  • Design and creation of Interaction RITA (Phase Two), a real-time information system for riders of the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system. Built entirely in Voice XML, Interaction RITA is designed to ultimately include all regional transit agencies and a synchronized mobile app for up-to-the-minute GPS, station, and transit information, as well as simulated Clipper fare card transaction, and uses the BART API to deliver real-world, real-time information to callers.

  • Authoring corollary documentation (brochure, use cases, instructions) for demo and sales support

  • Design Phase 1 speech-enabled IVR application for the nation’s largest provider of educational software; estimated to have saved the company tens of thousands of dollars in agent-related costs within first year of deployment.

Education & Training

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA — Professional Certificate in Design Thinking
Saybrook University, Pasadena, CA — Ph.D, Psychology of Creativity (All But Dissertation)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY — M.S., Human-Computer Interaction
University of California, Santa Cruz, CA — Professional Certificate in Management of Technical Information
Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA —B.A. Ed., (Majors: Music, Theatre, Spanish)