United States

UX Design

Service Design

Service Design Research

Bachelor of Studies

Mike Aragon

UX Manager

Communication

Problem-solving

Empathy

Team player

Presentation skills

Stakeholder management

User research

Figma

Critical-thinking

Introduce yourself, define mentoring expectations and goals. Learn and grow together.

General mentorship

Understand the process of training, motivating and directing your team members.

Managing people

Steps to building and maintaining a strong, cohesive and effective team.

Building an effective team

Learn the tips to successfully manage a team in a remote environment.

Managing a remote team

Get actionable feedback on your resume or portfolio.

Resume and portfolio review

Practice HR, technical and behavioural interviews with mentors.

Practice mock interviews

Identify and define potential product problems and generating possible solutions.

Identifying problems vs solutions

How to work with team members with different skill sets but towards a common goal?

Working cross-functionally

Methods and models of exploring, deciding and delivering design.

Building a design process

How to define an ambitious product vision and how to best communicate it to stakeholders?

Creating a product vision

Our mission is to advance the practice of design in the Denver Metro area by building a safe and inclusive community of local design leaders to learn from each other, heal from our challenges and share our mistakes and successes of leading design teams and demonstrating design's value to business.

Are you a Design Leader who is struggling to get your organization to adopt modern design? Have you had success and failures building and managing design teams? If so we would love to hear your story.

I lead a team that uses a blend of Lean, Design Thinking, User Research, Service Design, and User Experience to solve complex business problems for a large-scale financial services company.

Accomplishments:

- Created a "Fact-Base" process based on User Research, Task Analysis, Benefit Modeling, and a Future State vision document to identify opportunities within Charles Schwab to enable automation via RPA(Robotic Process Automation), digital strategies, process, and policy improvements that would significantly improve the client experience and increase process efficiency.

- Led adoption of Design Thinking and Lean UX as a core process in product development.
Created and facilitated the Design Sprint process to create alignment for cross-functional teams and stakeholders.  The outputs (Service Blueprint, Prototypes, Mockups, Personas) of the Design Sprints fed directly into our Agile Development process so that a full backlog of user stories were created and supported with the required artifacts.

- Created a standard UI Design System for BPT technical development teams. 

- Created a usability testing practice to drive a user-centered design process based on qualitative and quantitative research.

- Collaborated with our Business Intelligence team to measure workflow process optimization. This allowed us to measure the overall impact of usability improvements that have been implemented. 

- Created program-wide COE (Center of Excellence) to establish standards and processes for all User Experience engagement including Design Sprints, Journey Mapping, Service Design, Service Design Blueprints, Reusable UI patterns, Usability Testing, Quantitative and Qualitative Research, Agile/Scrum UI Development support, Mockups, and Prototypes.

•	Provided UX support for a large cross-functional UX team to design responsive web solutions for Charter’s website, www.charter.net.
•	Created information architecture, detailed and annotated wireframes, UI mockups, workflows and detailed UI specifications for our development team.
•	Created low and high fidelity clickable prototypes for conceptual review with all key stakeholders. 
•	Produced UI specifications, personas, storyboards, scenarios, journey maps and prototypes.
•	Worked with TV, Mobile and Web product teams to create cohesive user experience across all platforms.
•	Significantly reduce call driver support by analyzing and improving UX for online bill pay, web activation channel, web mail, forget password and create ID flows.
•	Redesigned Online Bill Pay process that significantly improved the overall user experience that realized a cost savings of over $2 million per year due to reduced calls for support, loss revenue due to late payments as well as increase to Auto-Pay enrollment.
•	Used A/B testing to optimize conversion rates as well as test UX improvements.
•	Collaborated with team to incorporate usability testing protocol within UX process.

•	Led UX team to improve existing operations systems within Comcast customer support centers.
•	Worked with multiple stakeholders to understand business needs and created solutions to optimized customer support service for Comcast customers.
•	Composed technical and highly detailed documents using diagrams, illustrations, and prototypes to support the implementation of design proposals.
•	Worked with product teams to maintain cohesive user experience across different products.
•	Defined usability & design goals and metrics.
•	Conducted workplace observations and user interviews to understand user needs and contexts of use.
•	Ran usability evaluations to ensure UI met product goals and those goals align with user needs.
•	Developed and maintained the “master” UI standards.
•	Designed user interfaces and information architecture using Lean UX techniques.
•	Worked closely with development teams to ensure that design specifications are implemented.
•	Produced user requirements specifications, personas, storyboards, scenarios, flowcharts, design prototypes, and design specifications.
•	Reviewed UI deliverables to ensure best practices and standards (including cross-browser) are applied.
•	Maintain relationships with internal groups and external vendors.
•	Collaborated with team members to analyze and optimize the application performance.

•	Guided the translation of complex requirements into a user interaction design by applying user interface design principles to create a user interaction design specification that efficiently and effectively met the business goals. 
•	Collaborated on creating design guidelines, providing instructions to less experienced employees. 
•	Guided the analysis of complex requirements by overseeing and performing task analysis to identify task sequences and applying the information to design future task execution. 
•	Oversaw the creation of user scenarios that capture and communicate the frequent and/or critical tasks for projects. 
•	Worked with the business partner and product manager to define and document complex business and user requirements by performing usability analysis activities such as field studies, contextual inquiry and interviews to understand business practices, user groups, work objectives, tasks and improvement opportunities. 
•	Created development of personas, user profiles and usability goals to guide product design and establish usability metrics. 
•	Led others in evaluating and measuring usability by performing activities such as informal and formal usability testing and heuristic reviews. 
•	Applied human factors, usability and user interface design principles to identify and diagnose complex usability problems. 
•	Validated that user requirements have been met and provided recommendations for design improvements. 
•	Measured performance against usability goals for projects with complex evaluation requirements.

•	Developed and managed the user experience and UI standards for all client facing software.
•	Created and implemented usability testing protocol that allowed user feedback to be integrated directly into software development process.  
•	Created UI wireframes and high fidelity mockups for product owner review sessions.
•	Created detailed UI specifications for our UI development team.
•	Defined and created clear, visually-compelling, intuitive and globally consistent interfaces
•	Mentored our UI development team in UI/UX best practices.
•	Gained the respect of the UI development team through active dialogue and collaboration to create an effective UI for our users while balancing against time and resource constraints.
•	Supported marketing efforts by creating various graphical assets as well as designing and creating marketing brochures

•	Worked closely with usability team members, content team, product managers, development teams and other internal stakeholders to build proof-of-concept mockups, demos and prototypes based on business requirements and goals.
•	Developed detailed UI specifications for developers to implement within US and foreign web sites.
•	Collaborated with multiple departments to help design and bring iPhone app to market.
•	Clearly defined and documented user interaction and guidelines for multi-national web delivery.
•	Used A/B testing to optimize conversion rates, sales and overall revenue for ecommerce sites.
•	Worked across multiple departments and vendors to incorporate user centered design while meeting business goals and balancing SDLC (software development life cycle) resources.
•	Created information architecture, UI mockups, UI assets, wireframes, workflows and detailed UI specifications.
•	Promote user centered design processes, standards, and best practices within the various projects.

•	Responsible for design of new and redesign of existing software applications and features with a focus on the user’s experience and interaction with the goal of making the user’s interaction clear and efficient.  
•	Collaborate with business users, students, and IT peers in the creation of user centric designs, with a focus on creating designs that are not only operational, but also usable and adaptable based on the user’s needs.  
•	Provide technical leadership, coaching and mentoring to other team members in implementing user centric design principles throughout the SDLC process.  
•	Design complex web user interface and application interactions within a Microsoft .net multi-tier environment.
•	Lead information architecture data gathering through various methods, such as card sorting and infinity diagramming. 
•	Rapidly develop wireframes and mock-ups of user interfaces for both web and desktop applications based on user/stakeholders requirements.
•	Develop storyboards for new applications, modules or functionality.
•	Develop UI specifications for internal and external web sites and web applications.
•	Work with .net teams in designing and developing final UI.  
•	Conduct usability testing of new and current interfaces, designs, websites, web and desktop applications.
•	Gather information on user metrics from automated tools, surveys, and direct observation.
•	Work across multiple departments and vendors to incorporate user centered design while meeting business goals and balancing SDLC (software development life cycle) resources.

•	Responsible for designing and maintaining all dynamically database driven websites.  Responsible for implementing various web and email marketing strategies for a wide range of projects.  
•	Responsible for creating and maintaining web-based applications, web sites, email and print marketing campaigns.
•	Utilized A/B testing for email campaigns to improve lead conversion.
•	Customized lead management system updating PHP/SQL code based on user requirements.
•	Provided support for web-based applications, public facing web sites and email marketing campaigns using various web based languages and software: PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, Photoshop, InDesign and Fireworks.
•	Developed wireframes, mock ups, and story boards for new web applications.
•	Implemented Open Source CMS (WordPress) solution for web 2.0 course content application.  Customized modules and templates for course content delivery based on user access.
•	Implemented and maintained SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies, including Google AdWords to increase company websites visibility and search engine traffic.

Mike Aragon🇺🇸

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