Why UX matters to me

When I was getting my degree in Childhood & Special Education, I read "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson in my free time and was fascinated at how complex it is to design something that is simple and easy to use.

I was teaching at York Elementary School when I realized I wanted to make a difference for teachers through technology and design.

I left teaching and earned my UX certificate at General Assembly. I got a job at an ed-tech startup called TeachersConnect — where I designed a social networking app for teachers.

I learned how powerful UX is and saw how much I improved the lives of teachers — if I could help teachers with UX, who else could I help?

Fast forward, and I'm currently helping patients get quality healthcare at CVS Health through virtual care and MinuteClinics. As a manager, I use my teaching skills to mentor designers and help them achieve their career goals.

Photo of a t-shirt my students signed for me at the end of the school year and the "Steve Jobs" book I read. I wanted to help teachers through technology and design — so I joined General Assembly.

Photo of me and Julie Situ whiteboarding at General Assembly.

Skills & Experience

Career Timeline

Sr. Experience Design Manager & Lead at CVS Health (2023-Present)

Managing the Digital Health Services design team, delivering health notification designs, and leading integration of 3rd party health partnerships into the CVS app.

Managed 20 direct reports with a 100% trust rating (CVS Mgmt Survey 2024) by:
- Personalized monthly coaching to drive promotions and improve performance]
- Building collaborative and trusting relationships with Product & Engineering
- Managing org changes with role agreements & retros to improve process
Introduced new planning process and stakeholder checkpoints that reduced design delivery time by 2 weeks on average (~35%) per feature
Improved CVS Health Virtual Care design, achieving a 95% conversion rate
Evolved email design system with testing insights (increasing CTA engagement by 65%) and added SMS and Push notifications (reaching 8M patients annually)
Strategized, designed, and managed integrating 3rd party partnerships (sale with Solera) into the CVS app (allowing 10M patients to access free health programs)
Integrated AI to accelerate research and design tasks from days to hours

Experience Design Manager at CVS Health (2021-2023)

Led the design creation of CVS Health Virtual Care, a new email design system, and the MinuteClinic health visit checklist while managing 7 designers.

Designed CVS Health Virtual Care with the team, reaching 1M+ users in 2023
Created a design system for emails to unify design and content across lines of business, consolidating 221 health service email designs into 23 templates
Optimized the MinuteClinic Pre-Visit Checklist, increasing conversion to 90%
Managed direct reports and led hiring/onboarding processes

Product Design Manager at Wayfair (2020-2021)

Managed, supported, and mentored a design student through project management and professional development in a full-time student co-op program
Led vision and strategy of visual redesign and rebranding for our supplier platform by managing design and engineering teams
Supervised and advised 27 product designers who implemented our design system’s new standardized design patterns across 180 tools

Product Designer at Wayfair (2018-2019)

Evolved our design system by designing new components for product teams and updating our grid system to 4px by creating a new Sketch pattern library
Led and executed the research, strategy, education, and rollout of Abstract to maintain Wayfair’s growing enterprise design team and design system
Created an on-boarding committee and wrote 18 design education articles to help increase efficiency and improve the experience of on-boarding new hires
Researched, designed, and user tested a new media repository platform
Increased efficiency of Wayfair's 3D model QA process by redesigning tool

UX Designer at TeachersConnect (2017-2018)

Designed a social-networking app and website based on teacher feedback
Created marketing websites for TeachersConnect partners and teachers

General Assembly UX Program (2016)

Found that UX combines my two biggest strengths: understanding people's problems and strong visual design
Designed four projects in a 10-week full-time UX program

Digital Media and IT (2013-2016)

Created graphics, videos, and other art as the media consultant for students at my university
Gained an appreciation for minimalistic design
Fixed software and technical computer problems for students and staff