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Hi, I’m Nick.

I’m a design/product lead, and have been building digital products for ~9 years alongside some amazing teams. I’m currently at Noodle, solving marketplace problems in education with platform services.

I’ve done agency, in-house, consumer, SaaS, design systems, team management, user research, product strategy, native mobile, responsive web, you name it. At heart, I’m a designer, a researcher, a product person, a jack of all trades, and master of a few things. This portfolio is an overview of work. If you’re interested in case studies, let’s talk!

MY WORK

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SAAS PLATFORM

Empowering educators to be entrepreneurs

Role: Director of Design

Independent tutors, and tutoring small businesses have a million different home-grown ways of operating. Most of these businesses were not built for scale or by digitally savvy individuals, and many are still cash operated. As a result, they’re burdened by complicated payment policies and administrative overhead, and many sessions go unpaid.

By creating a ‘set it and forget it’ invoicing system that uses a pre-pay billing model fully integrated with a scheduling tool, we guide the administrators to save time, and reduce the number of sessions that go unbilled, and unpaid.

Clark was acquired by Noodle in October, 2019.

Read the case study

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Branding & Design System

A new marketing site that keeps conversion high amid strategy iterations

I reworked Clark’s visual language with the development of a new responsive marketing site using Contentful and Gatsby JS. This new CMS now allows anyone in the company to build and publish on-brand landing pages, form flows, and content pages without relying on an engineer. We didn’t get a chance to iterate on the brand before the acquisition, but check out a sneak peek animation showcasing what it might have become (made with after effects).

We also built a fully customizable form builder to provide our marketing and sales teams the ability to create high performing, modular info collection forms for lead generation. User data then automatically routes to Product, Sales and CX teams to utilize in their respective tools – Segment, Mixpanel, Salesforce, and Slack.

visit hiclark.com

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Life 3.0 – 5.0

Making shopping for life insurance suck less.

Role: Product Design Lead

I worked on Policygenius’ Life Insurance product, their bread-and-butter experience, from its first major re-desgin, and into subsequent iterations by following a hypothesis-driven experimentation process.

We systematically launched and tested 20 major features in variants, over the course of 8 months leading to a total 40% increase in conversion from landing page to a submitted insurance application, getting in thousands more people to feel good about getting the financial protection they need.

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Branding & Design System

Brand overhaul with a react component library

I helped Policygenius translate a slick new set of brand guidelined developed with Red Antler into a useable UI component library and worked to redesign every page on the site with the design and engineering teams.

My role was to rethink every component, design a new grid system, a new global nav, secondary content pages, and most importantly, the Life Insurance product flow which would serve as a template for all the other product flows.

Read about the grid system

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Mobile product Research & Strategy

Finding a new ‘north star’ mobile strategy.

Role: UX & Research Strategy Lead

I worked with ‘Fortune 1’ to uncover and make sense of their vast library of customer research and institutional knowlege to help them see who their customers really are, and how they interact with their mobile devices.

My role on this 2 month project was to interview all of Walmart’s top product leaders, synthesize 48 research studies across product, marketing, and in-store, and develop a strategic mobile research plan.

With this information, we were able to help bridge product and marketing goals under one mobile north star offering.

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From CONCEPT to iOS v3.2

A brand new product for small business owners.

Role: Product Owner, Lead Designer

Starting in March 2016, I led a discovery project to re-think OPEN Forum’s mobile app with a new overarching strategy. In phase 2 (May-Nov 2016), we built & launched iOS & Android.

The product sought to give business owners a better way to connect with one another at events & conferences. With the AMEX Open Forum app, you can build a profile, find other small business owners by location and industry, rsvp for events, see who’s attending what, and message other business owners directly.

My role was to lead the team in creating a viable product concept, make it a reality for Android and iOS users, and work with the AMEX Marketing teams to bring it to market, and through several post-release iterations.

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Android Ecommerce 2.0

Refocusing on conversion for a maturing brand

Role: Product & UX Design Lead

During the midst of a brand overhaul, I worked with the Abercrombie Technology team as their native mobile design lead to rethink the mobile ecommerce experience. Their old apps were just wrappers showing the m.dot website, and were not functional or meeting expectations. So we started from scratch, beginning with Android (where most of their customers were). A&F had one goal: improve the bottom line.

With heat maps, analytics, and extensive user testing, we paired qualitative and quantitative data to support a divergence from the m.dot website experience they were already comfortable with, and offer new interactions and personalization that only native apps can provide.

4 years later, the Abercrombie & Fitch apps design and IA have held up, and are largely unchanged today. Check them out on the App Store and the Google Play store.

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iOS, Android, and Responsive Web

A fresh new cut of ecommerce products for a playful brand.

Role: UX Lead

Edible Arrangements challenged us to rethink their digital eCommerce products. Alongside a team of three product designers, I focused on our overall design strategy and problem solving for the project’s more ambiguous challenges.

The primary challenge was to design a friction free experience for a complex inventory and availability check, to determine whether a product was available to a customer, and provide the best alternative when it wasn’t.

Download from the app store

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THE ARCHIVES

We all started somewhere

Before I started making products I spent years building websites freelance, and designing for recording artists like John Legend, Reggie Watts, and Portugal. The Man at record labels and management companies.

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About me

I’ve been making human centered products from a foundation in design, research, and business for almost a decade. I do best in roles where I can collaborate with product managers and engineers, guide the experience strategy with the right amount of user research, and optimize for experimentation and learning.

With my degree in Sociology & Business of Technology, I’ve had a love for studying and learning how people interact with their machines since before I even knew UX design was a thing. I also understand that products must not only serve people, but also be viable, supported, and measured effectively by the business.

I believe empowered design teams can be a strategic advantage for driving business outcomes. When I’m not making products, you can find me outside.