Work Experience

June 2021 – Present

Senior UX Designer & HCD Lead — Truss Works Inc.

HCD Lead — Sept. 2025 - Present

• Built and led an HCD shared-services practice from the ground up: created onboarding curricula, recurring 1:1 structures, and cross-product community-of-practice sessions for a seven person design team.

Lead Designer— June 2021- Sept. 2025

• Led end-to-end service design for a Medicaid Managed Care submission, review, and approval system spanning a digital state submission portal, and internal CMS approval system.
• Navigated ambiguous federal regulatory constraints to design a system adopted by 80% of states — 6 months before any mandates were in place — and reduced state staff time on submissions by 50%.
• Measured and validated multi-channel service impact: 120% improvement in CMS ease-of-use scores, 50% improvement for state users, 35% average CMS time savings on submission intake, and 25% increase in submission accuracy — tracked via recurring survey instruments built and run independently.
• Owned accessibility end-to-end: DHS Trusted Tester certified; designed and facilitated “acceptance jam” workshops to surface Section 508 compliance issues pre-launch; authored and revived a company-wide accessibility scorecard used across project teams.
• Translated complex regulatory and policy constraints into client-facing artifacts — service blueprints, decision records, and process flows — used directly by engineering and product to implement systems and by CMS leadership to align on roadmap decisions.
• Cultivated alignment across frustrated, often opposing federal and state stakeholder groups through facilitated workshops and recurring touchpoints, resulting in direct-award contract renewal and sustained program buy-in; presented program outcomes at the Medicaid Enterprise Systems Conference (MESC) alongside the CMS Product Owner.

January 2021 – June 2022

Senior Analyst, User Experience Researcher- Kin and Carta

• Evangelized internal stakeholders on the importance of research methodologies through active inclusion in activities such as usability testing
• Persuaded client stakeholders to conduct information architecture testing to improve navigation issues
• Constructed multi-method research plans which included: secondary research, heuristic and competitive analysis, interviews, and usability testing
• Developed actionable recommendations to increase uptake in a feature that had a historically reduced rate of conversion for users
• Collaborated with design and engineering to restructure a feature process flow within infrastructure/ technological restraints
• Monitored and enhanced a client’s internal feedback repository that guided priority for the research backlog
• Leveraged internal resources to triangulate data that provided more contextual insights to our attitudinal survey
• Initiated meetings and collaborated with the client’s research team to improve best practices and recruitment

Education

DePaul University, Masters of Science in Human Computer Interaction, GPA: 4.00/4.00
November 2020

Skills

Accessibility

• DHS Trusted Tester certified

Communication & Interpersonal

• Experienced public speaker
• Survey creation and distribution
• Interviewing
• Moderated and unmoderated usability testing

Software

• Proficient in Photoshop, Illustrator, XD, Axure, ATLAS.ti, Stormboard, Qualtrics, UserZoom

Coding Language

• Basic understanding of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, jQuery UI

Conceptual

• Scrum ceremonies
• Agile process
• Persona development
• Ethnography studies
• Prototyping
• Wireframing
• Card sorting

Activites

• Served as President for the DePaul Experience Design (XD) Roundtable Student Organization 2019-2020
• Volunteer UX Researcher / Designer for Code for Chicago – March 2021 – July 2021