I’m Kristy, a learning strategist, product designer, storyteller, and video game enthusiast.
I foster playful and imaginative environments for organizations, communities, and individuals to explore their current circumstances and map out their ideal future. I apply human-centered design, futures thinking, visual storytelling, and collaborative play as power-ups to co-create new worlds of possibility with multiple paths to success.
I’ve worked in Education, Education Technology (EdTech), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Retail Grocery. Today I am a Senior Horizontal Product Designer and LUMA Instructor at Kroger Technology and Digital.
🚀 Product Design
I’ve worked with product centric teams to build-test-learn-launch life changing college and career readiness curriculums, deliver time saving transcript matching solutions, and untangle multi system and actor problem spaces for internal users.
🎓 Mentoring and Instruction
I’ve helped 100s of product managers and designers develop their design thinking, discovery, and human-centered design skills via workshops, live learning, templates, and toolboxes.
♟️Workshop Facilitation
I’ve hosted strategy sessions and workshops to help product managers and business stakeholders define new products and product directions.
🤝 Co-Creation and Generative Research
I’ve organized and facilitated multiple user research and co-creation labs at user conferences, in classrooms, and at internal student career events, gathering insights from hundreds of engaged individuals from 1st graders to adults.
📚 Storytelling
I’ve self-published 2 books and had work published in 2 comics anthologies. I support the next generation of storytellers as a Mentor with Girls Write Now.
Process
The design process is a human-centered learning loop of think+make+test.
This loop is at its most powerful when designers collaborate across the business, not just with our product and engineering partners. From discovering new problems to solve to defining the visual language of a customer’s brand and product experience, design has an important role to play.
In an agile world, designers are compelled to run multiple phases of design and design research in parallel. Designers lead formative research and discovery at the same times as directional research and development. My teams take big picture views to ensure the entire customer journey works while adjusting flow and pixel details to optimize for engagement and conversion. When designers consider both the business and customers, great products are crafted - ones that fulfill a human need while meeting broader business goals, like adoption, revenue growth, and retention.
Design Vision and Strategy
I help businesses define an experience vision for their products and services. Leveraging tools like storyboards, personas, conceptual mockups, and storytelling, I inspire stakeholders to see the potential human and business impact of product and service investments. I push teams to consider outcomes over outputs, and that starts before an item is on a roadmap.
Customer Experience Research
From defining the problem to be solved to laying out the structure details of a screen, I consider customers a key design partner. Customer interviews, contextual inquiry, co-design workshops, prototype experiments, are all unique opportunities to learn from the real people who will use a product or service. The earlier a team begins running experiments, the stronger the final product becomes.
Design Facilitation
Design works better with others. I model design sessions, such as design sprints, journey mapping exercises, user story mapping, and other workshops that help gather inputs, generate ideas, and build consensus. Design facilitation can be leveraged at various stages of a company’s design process. I believe you can empower all business units to borrow from the design facilitation toolkit to improve and innovate for the customer.
Interaction and Visual Design
I believe in end-to-end product design. As such, the flow and visual language of a product is key element of the process. This includes how a person flows from screen to screen, how errors are handled, and the product’s usability. It also includes details like animation, illustration, and even the application of game-like mechanics to improve motivation and engagement. Accessibility, inclusivity and design systems are critical aspects to consider in this layer of design.
Discovery Instruction and Tools
How do you bring everyone on board to understand a problem … especially remote. I create method templates and organize playful events to help product managers and product designers explore new methods for their teams’ discovery playbook, multiplying the learning abilities of the product team. I also am a certified LUMA instructor.
Coaching and Connection
Designers and technologists are humans first. I create intentional time and space to meet 1 on 1 with peers and partners to bridge the connection gap, consult on workshops and working sessions, and support individuals as they develop their discovery and designs skills through feedback and practice. These 1:1 connects are a big energy boost.
Recommendations
“Kristy is one of the most passionate team members I've worked with. She deeply and sincerely cares about her end users, her teammates and her work. That passion is reflected in how hard she works toward high quality deliverables, her advocation for end users, and the collaboration she strives for. Kristy is highly talented across the multi-faceted user experience discipline, including strategy, research, information architecture and interaction design. Kristy also can think through a full enterprise design, applying atomic design principles to think through the system of UI components and how those translate to a holistic, compelling style guide and experience. Kristy is a true gem, and brings drive and talent to her projects."
Cristine Antolik Cravens - Director of Product Design, Kroger Technology and Digital
“Kristy is the best user experience engineer I have ever worked with. She is passionate about the systems users and the product. The role between her and the product owner became blurred given her knowledge of the problem domain the application set out to address based on her experience and research. The team greatly benefited from her leadership as she taught them about persona mapping, story mapping, and domain development. If I was building a team and needed a UX specialist she would be the first person that came to mind."
Mark Lewis - Senior Manager, Product Development, Paycor
Get in Touch
I’m happy to grab a tea or coffee to chat about what I do. Give me a shout!
