My Interview Guide

This may be a script I use to help me compose my thoughts. If you're a prospect employer casually browsing, howdy! 👋

9 Years Experience

Delivering enterprise design systems that are multi-channel, tech-stack agnostic and accessibility tested.

5 years in Enterprise Design Systems

4 years experience with front-end development

4 years in Mobile

Android: Jetpack Compose, Material 2, Material 3
- Currently tuning up on Material 3 Expressive
iOS: SwiftUI - best way to build apps across Apple platforms
Ionic Framework - mobile software development kit (SDK) for the web

5 years with Saas experience

6 years of experience with international cross-functional teams

3 years of management experience

Keybank: Hiring, Staffing, Onboarding, Software Licensing, Tracking, Offboarding
Fidelity: Design System, Token Architecture, Web UI Toolkits
Mentoring: Recurring 1:1s, Office Hours, Guild Meetings, Lunch and Learns, Design Critiques

Graduate degree in User Experience Design

Level	Course	Semester
60001	UXD Principles and Concepts	2019 Summer
60002	UXD in Practice	2019 Summer
60102	Principles of Interaction	2019 Fall
60112	Interaction in Practice	2019 Fall
60104	Usability I	2020 Spring
60114	Usability II	2020 Spring
60101	Information Architecture I	2020 Summer
60111	Information Architecture II	2020 Summer
60117	UXD Leadership	2020 Fall
60118	Accessibility Evaluation	2020 Fall
60103	Researching User Experience I	2021 Spring
66080	Portfolio Design Assessment	2021 Spring

Methods for measuring success

FDS: Availability, Adoption (Usage), Value (Cost Savings/Speed-to-market)
NetBenefits: Engagement, 35.3 million, Visits: 26.5% Increase YoY, Satisfaction
Other: NetPromoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), User Reported Errors, Task Success Rate, Time-on-task

Methods for evaluating accessibility

Reference Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
Manual
- Inspect Panel
- GitHub > Branch > Local Testing
- Testing Device > local IPA
Automated: Custom Accessibility Tool (CAT - Fidelity)

Competencies	Examples
Experience	I am a multi-faceted designer with 9 years of experience across e-commerce, financial instutions and most recently health insurance.
Specialization	I am fluent with design thinking framework and comfortable with leading under ambiguous constraints across multi-channel experience like iOS, Android and responsive web.
AI Interests	Lately, I've been trying to find ways to incorporate more AI into my workflow as I've been needing to get creative with being more scrappy to deliver with less resources. I used Copilot to help extract user stories from broader strategy conversations with OKRs. Since 2023, I've starting my front-end developer journey to be a stronger techincal partner, vibe coding helped me ship my portfolio and midwesthusbands.com.
Leadership	As a UX Lead at KeyBank and Medical Mutual, I have led 5-10 designers, across multiple development teams. I am familiar with aligning design deliverables to business OKRs/KPIs by partnering with cross functional team members to conduct quarterly planning, coordinate with research and content strategy, ideate, prototype, test and deliver.
Leadership	As a Principal Design System Designer at Fidelity, I led enterprise wide initiatives to modernize and streamline design and development to improve speed to market and generate cost savings in product development and maintenance.

At a personal level:

Interests	Descriptions
DIY	Definitely a maker in the making from learning how to use a circular saw to a table saw, router and learning how to set up a collection system. Notable completed projects include: Furniture side tables, and lots of mouldings to make our center hall colonial build feel more cozy.
3D Printing	I've started to venture into 3D design software with aspirations to have a product shop as a small business owner.
Midwest Husbands	A lifestyle blog with my husband where we share adventures where we find inspiration for the home, occasional diy and cooking recipe filled with lots of positivity and midwest nice!
Front-end Development	Learned to code my own portfolio and Midwest Husband site and further practicsing and leveling up my technical skills, while ultimately trying to save growing costs from money walls for addons to other web hosting alternatives.

Screening	Target
Is this role full time employment?	FTE
Is there a target salary base for this role?	$redacted-$redacted
What is the hiring timeline for this role?	Early June
What does your interview process look like?	# of Rounds
How many initiatives would I be supporting as a UX Lead?	1-3
How many designers would I be leading?	1-3

Getting work done	Target
What working methodology does {company} use to deliver product?	Agile Methodology
What tools and hardware is design using to collaborate?	Mac, Figma, Usertesting?
How does the team prioritize initiatives?	Agile Methodology

Work culture	Target
How large is the ux organization, including research and content?	> 15 designers
What is the average designer to initiative ratio?	Designer 1:3 Developer

• • •

Focus	Outline
End user goals or jobs to be done, as well as data, research, or other insights that informed my understanding of the opportunity	1.0
Team environment: Who else was involved in this decision? How did I collaborate with cross-functional team members?	2.0
Options we explored (I supported with mockups, sketches, and other artifacts) and pros and cons we considered as a team.	3.0
My role in the team. What specifically did I contribute?	4.0
Technical/business/project considerations and constraints that informed the design decision. How did I navigate around this?	5.0
Final decision and rationale: focus on what I personally contributed	6.0
What I learned about the effectiveness of my decision and what I would do differently in the future	7.0