Visual Design Strategy

Passionate and empathetic leader in user-centered design

I'm a design team lead and UX/UI strategist with 11 years of experience in enterprise B2B and B2C environments where I apply user-centered design thinking and research to improve the services and products that comprise a customer's experience.

My passion is to cultivate and guide diverse, cross-functional teams to drive organizational alignment and produce value for the customer and business - thereby increasing revenue. In particular, I thrive when contributing across the discovery, user research, product strategy, UX and visual design lifecycle. I am driven to produce visual excellence in an experience that is inclusive, seamless, and satisfying to use.

Dawn Russell

Methodology

Influence

Value alignment
Influence
Garner stakeholder and team buy-in through aligning business requirements, user needs, and the problem frame. Evaluate services and products with heuristic, competitive, and data-driven metrics analysis.

Insight

Curiosity becomes clarity
Insight - UX Design, Dawn Russell
Conduct discovery interviews, diary studies, and surveys. Develop personas, journey maps, and user workflows. Card sort and draft content strategy. Produce low-fidelity wireframes and prototypes.

Interface

Making meaning for our users
Interface - UX design, Dawn Russell
Design and refine the visual and interactive elements, improve the information architecture by incorporating user needs and preferences, design for usability, accessibility & efficiency.

Implementation

Visual Design and Design Ops
Implementation
Produce high fidelity interactive prototype(s), build symbols and patterns in the design system, collaborate closely with front-end engineers, and consistently enhance features to improve customer adoption and engagement. Usability testing, a/b testing, iteration, and delivery.

Public Projects

For more recent proprietary projects, please contact me.

Mount Holyoke College Menu

Product Strategy
User Research
UX Design
Visual Design
2017-2018 | Lead a team that incorporated metrics, personas, surveys, prototyping, and moderated user testing to redesign and build a web and mobile menu product for the college.
Mount Holyoke College Menu

Apelon

Content strategy
Visual design
UI development
2015-2017 | Complete brand redesign to update a legacy site and graphic materials with the goal of making the content more accessible to key decision makers within health care organizations.
Apelon 3 Views

Tasha Tudor and Family

Information architecture
UX design
Visual design
UI development
2016-2017 | Design and build an information architecture that unified an ecommerce platform, blog, recipe feed, and tours into a community-based, singular brand experience.
Tasha Tudor and Family - 3 Views

Artrageus1

Information architecture
UX design
Visual design
UI development
2015-2017 | Design and build an ecommerce platform fueld by a subscription based arts collective model. End-to-end rebranding of graphic materials and web based products.
Artrageus1 - 3 Views

Connect with me

I'm currently open to speaking engagements, collaborative exchange, and select, highly creative freelance projects. Please reach out and say hi.
Contact Dawn