
Making AN IMPACT
I have a track record of successfully partnering with diverse groups of people to improve the lives of our customers, and to make data-driven design decisions that are aligned with our business and revenue goals. I am passionate about putting users at the center of our design practice, and validating designs with users before they are developed. Here are some of the milestones that we have achieved by building relationships, partnering across the organization, and working with our customers.
01 - Scaling
User Research
Between 2015 - 2019, under my leadership, our team, scaled research practices to increase customer participation year round. At our annual user conferences, we grew the types and number of studies, and increased user research participation by 2000% over 5 years. During the pandemic, we shifted seamlessly to on online conference and UX Lan that maintained participation in the hundreds due to the trust and relationship building over the previous years.
02 - Improving
Accessibility + WCAG Compliance
Led Accessibility advocacy campaign to increase the number of designers, product managers, full-stack developers, and QA engineers trained in Accessible design, program management, and development; taking us from two fully trained employees in Oct 2021 to 30+ employees actively in training today. Additionally, our design team developed a design system and UI component library that was optimized for WCAG compliance out of the box. In our Spring release of 2022, we had our first page with zero Accessibility issues, and we are on track to eliminate all serious and critical A11y bugs from our top pages in the next major release.

03
Presenting: "We've Never Done This Before"
Co-Presented at EX19 Conference on Setting your Ego
Aside to Turn Chaos into Collaboration during an Acquisition
An acquisition can completely upend an organization, changing how we work—and whom we work with—often with no plan to manage the shift. When Accela acquired eight companies in 2015, we brought on hundreds of employees and dozens of products, but only one designer. Our UX team was now faced with integrating products from unfamiliar industries by working with teams unfamiliar with UX. Ken Hoffmann and Nova Wehman-Brown will discuss how setting aside their egos, and leaning on concrete data and user-centered design (internally and externally) built trust among teammates and turned chaos into collaboration in a fairly short period of time.
04
User Conference Experience Center
Coming soon...
