Hello! My name is Kat.

I like to understand the world through a critical design lens.

People do read. Selectively. I work collaboratively to craft experiences based on research and customer needs. My training and experience with writing, photography, digital architecture, strategy, and customer mapping can possibly help you. What I care about is helping people and organizations reach their goals of increasing quality, both in terms of product and process. Sustainability and accessibility are important to me, and aren't optional for product development.

Hobbies: Taking photos of porches, baking, hiking, drawing, running, painting, and listening to music.

Portfolio

Work Experience

(October 2022 - Present)

Guardian Life

Operate as a UX generalist across multiple projects on a shared service Agile group. Provide a wide range of UX services to business and technology teams to meet aggressive delivery deadlines. Day-to-day work includes writing, content design, product leadership, UX architecture, interaction design, UX research, and strategy.


(March 2022 - Present)

Connective Cube Content & Design

I provide freelance and contract support as a user experience practitioner. Also, I work as an independent researcher on reducing alcohol intake.

Notable clients include CVS Health (March 2022 - July 2022) and Vanguard (August 2022 - October 2022)


Fastspot

UX and Content Strategist (November 2020 - March 2022)

Provide strategy for design projets, including heuristic reviews, gathering content requirements, project plans, defining design constraints, and determining core audiences


Money Map Press

eCommerce Specialist (March 2020 - November 2020)
QA Analyst (February 2019 - February 2020)

Perform checks in staging and production environments for a multitude of projects, including development deployments and site configuration changes. Troubleshoot coding errors and clean up HTML/CSS on existing pages.

  • Significantly reduced ordering errors and increased responsive design output.
  • Contributed to eComm and promotional team efforts with designing with HTML/CSS, system maintenance, data analysis, cross-browser/device testing, and project management.

    • The Park School - Baltimore

    Database Administrator/Analyst (October 2017 - January 2019)

    Provided data administration in Raiser's Edge for the development and fundraising department. I mastered comparing large data sets in Excel with VLookup, served as the project lead for the annual report data listings, and provided data for monthly board reporting

    Johns Hopkins Medicine

    Contract Web Content Specialist (August 2018 - September 2018)

    I completed a temporary contract within Drupal and Confluence to setup new navigation structures for an association website release.

    StarChapter

    Implementation Specialist (March 2015 - June 2017)

    Provided a bi-weekly online training about managing responsive web content and generating emails in StarChapter. Updated HTML, CSS, and PHP code as needed to meet the customer's design requirements. Provided technical support, product assistance and training to the customer base of board members of local associations.

  • Gathered requirements and setup 100+ business systems with websites and relational databases for new customers.


    • Education

    University of Baltimore

    M.S. Student in Interaction Design and Information Architecture (IDIA)
    All but thesis. I'm researching and designing a system to digitize breathalyzer information.

    My goal in pursuing a Master's degree in IDIA at The University of Baltimore is to research accessbility for voice and gestural based devices. Part of this research is becoming technically proficient in programming interfaces.

    January 2020 - Present

    University of Baltimore

    UX Certificate
    Coursework in Design Psychology, Interaction Design, User Research Methods, and Information Architecture

    GPA: 4.00

    August 2018 - May 2019

    The Graduate Center at CUNY

    M.A. in Liberal Studies with a focus on Gender and Sexuality Studies
    PhD Level Coursework in educational + developmental psychology, sociology, and political philosophy. I pursued this program with a goal of applying for PhD programs; however, I decided to go into the private sector.
    May 2008 - January 2011

    New York University

    B.A. in Journalism and Mass Communication, minors in English Literature and Sociology
    September 2001 - May 2004

    Skills

    Languages & Tools
    Graduate Level Coursework