Role
UI/UX Lead
I translated ambiguous requirements into clear solutions through iterative prototyping and stakeholder alignment. This collaborative approach helped us deliver complex features while ensuring technical feasibility.
Conteneo's Weave
Serious games that foster strategic collaboration and consensus building on a platform in the cloud. Conteneo's Weave presents visual frameworks that product teams play on to prioritize features together, come to consensus with, run a retrospective on, and solve wicked problems using.
User Research & Mental Models
I led design jams, card sorts, and interviews to map user mental models, revealing gaps in onboarding, navigation, and collaboration.
Story Mapping & Prioritization
I co-created user story maps with PM and engineering to guide releases and focus on high-value features.
Design System & Prototyping
I built a reusable component library and delivered prototypes to test ideas, align the team, and streamline development.
The situation
Unintuitive Controls and Opaque Information Architecture
The dashboard and asset management interface posed even greater challenges:
Users frequently failed to locate their games or assets without trial and error.
Experienced users depended heavily on memory rather than cues in the UI.
New users felt lost, unsure where or how to begin.
Uninspired Gameplay Experience
User observation revealed significant friction across experience levels:
First-time users were confused about what to do and how to engage.
Players wanted better awareness of who was participating alongside them.
Even experienced users struggled with creating custom frameworks, limiting the platform’s flexibility.
Discovery & Synthesis
Identifying Pain Points
Users struggled to navigate months of games and assets, frequently losing track of retrospectives and tools like “Prune the Product Tree.” We set out to understand where confusion originated within the platform.
Uncovering Mental Models
We conducted a hybrid card sort, providing starting categories while allowing participants to define their own. This revealed significant variation in how users conceptualized the platform’s structure.
Empowering Users as Architects
To visualize ideal information architecture, we asked users to imagine the platform as a house: how many rooms, their connections, and what each would contain.
Prioritizing Feature Requests
After months of hearing scattered feedback, we facilitated in-person sessions to surface and prioritize needs—from quick wins like full-screen boards to more complex asks like streamlined framework creation tools.
Making What We Heard Visual
To align on what we truly learned from users, we synthesized insights in a collaborative working session. We debated key takeaways, challenged assumptions, and refined our shared understanding. This process ensured our team was ready to move forward with clarity and focus.
Story Mapping to Drive Development
We translated these insights into a user story map, covering two 24-foot walls filled with notes (our rebranded Slickies). This map charted the user journey and prioritized feature development for future releases—focusing on what would deliver the most user value. We digitized the map for ongoing collaboration and iteration.
Aligning Our Ships
I collaborated closely with both back-end and front-end engineers to create a unified information architecture diagram. This ensured alignment across disciplines, keeping design and development on course toward a shared vision.
Design & Prototyping
Feature requests and pain points point us in the right direction—but don’t always reveal the best path. To validate our ideas, I designed an interactive prototype in Keynote and facilitated usability sessions with power users. We observed their interactions closely, gathering insights where our assumptions missed the mark (sometimes by more than a little).
Scalable Design Through Reusable Components
With Weave’s design system ready to scale and a robust feature backlog, we needed a sustainable approach for a complex platform, delivered by a lean team of three engineers and one designer. Efficiency was critical.
The solution: reusable components. By designing flexible, modular elements (like the framework card and guest list editor), we enabled consistent user flows and interfaces that could be implemented across features with minimal redundant effort.
The Power of Prototyping
Prototyping was central to my work on Weave. I focused heavily on creating, sharing, and rapidly iterating interactive prototypes to bring user stories and components to life—ensuring alignment across design, engineering, and product teams.
Results and Impact
Surface What Matters
We flattened the rigid project-first hierarchy, making forums, frameworks, and other assets easy to find without deep navigation or complex searches.
Optional Structure, When Needed
For users who preferred organized views, the Projects tab provided scoped folders that dynamically filtered assets by hierarchy level—always sortable by date, status, or facilitator.
Surface What Matters
We flattened the rigid project-first hierarchy, making forums, frameworks, and other assets easy to find without deep navigation or complex searches.
Optional Structure, When Needed
For users who preferred organized views, the Projects tab provided scoped folders that dynamically filtered assets by hierarchy level—always sortable by date, status, or facilitator.
Who, what, where, when, and why
Weavers are now aware of who they're playing with and how to get more folks on board, what the objectives of the current session is and where they're placing items, and when folks entered the game and when they performed actions
Users are Creators
Thanks to the new framework creation tool, Weavers are able to create their own frameworks - not only for their own enjoyment and business needs - but for other users on the platform to utilize
Experience Design Strategist, Cisco
I recently conducted an innovation workshop with 40 employees in different locations....
...one participant said “I was dreading a 4 hour meeting on the phone. But, I was pleasantly surprised! The tools we used were fantastic! I felt so engaged. The time went by so fast.
Panoptika, Inc
You’ve done a great job at making the platform easier to use, more visually interesting, easier to understand, and let’s just say:
a great user experience from novice to power user.
Sr. Scrum Master, Abbott
All of the navigation was so much more obvious and directly-manipulable.
As a facilitator of many of these forums, explaining how to use the forums became much, much simpler. Overall, an extremely satisfying experience to use now.
Director of System Development
Covance
While the flexibility may’ve already been there, I really discovered it with Weave.
The explanation that “if it works on paper, it can be done in Weave” is a VERY powerful explanation that will make it easy to advocate for the platform.
