Black and white photo of a woman sitting on a couch, smiling, with her hand near her face. Behind her are two framed abstract artworks hanging on a white wall.

Senior UX Designer & Product Experience Leader✨

Hi - I'm Denise!

I’m a design leader with 12+ years of experience creating thoughtful digital products and guiding teams through complex problem spaces.

I translate vision into calm, intuitive experiences, blending strategy, craft, and emotional intelligence to build products that genuinely serve the people using them.

RESUME
Sample Projects

UX Design, Research, Strategy & Cross-Functional Leadership

I’m a UX designer and researcher who thrives in complexity and is at home in collaborative environments. I bring together vision, user insight, and practical execution to help teams build products that feel coherent, intuitive, and support humanity.

I work closely with leadership, product, and engineering to surface real needs, clarify direction, and design experiences that earn trust, while balancing intuition, research, and data to guide confident decision-making.

Brands I’ve Worked With

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What It’s Like to Work With Me

  • "Denise is a rare, agile, and visionary problem-solver. She brings a unique perspective to brand development, understands customers deeply, and is an ideal partner for any team.

    Andrea Nakayama - Founder & CEO - Functional Nutrition Alliance

  • "Denise is a thoughtful and skilled designer who excels at understanding complicated problems and delivering well-considered designs. She is an effective communicator and project manager, and successfully delivers on fixed budgets and timelines."

    Erik Johnson - Co-Founder @ Purpose UX

  • Renee - Testimonial

    "Creative instinct’ is the phrase that comes to mind when I think about Denise. Whether in product development, or marketing strategy -her ability to ideate and consider possibilities others might overlook is a real gift.”

    Renee Hunt - Marketing Manager

  • "Denise consistently provided design enhancements that facilitated a more cohesive user experience across multiple brand websites and marketing funnels. She is also kind & compassionate - and a great asset to any team."

    Mark Ward - Lead Developer

  • "Denise is a valuable team member, who brings stability amidst chaos. Her fresh perspectives and collaborative nature positively impact any project. She's an all-star, a true upgrade for any team.

    James Barracca - VP, UX Design Lead

Read More on Linkedin

How I Can Help

✨ UX Design Crafting user-centered experiences that drive engagement and conversions.
✨ Strategy Developing comprehensive strategies across your brand’s digital content ecosystem to achieve your business objectives.
✨ Research Conducting in-depth user research to inform design decisions and optimize user experiences. ✨ Content Strategy & Design Defining content standards, fostering brand consistency, and driving customer engagement by mapping and creating content for key audience segments.
✨ Marketing Assisting with mapping marketing needs across digital content ecosystems for maximum impact.
✨ Design System Creation, Maintenance, and Scaling Building and managing design systems for consistent and efficient design processes.
✨ Heuristic Audits Identifying areas for improvement and providing actionable recommendations to enhance user experiences.

✨ And more… I'm a true jill-of-all-trades and love to support great work getting out into the world. Let’s discuss how I can support your project!

Select Projects

Product Discovery & Website Redesign

UX Researcher & Strategist

Fresh audience insights, new customer niche, & enhanced customer journey

A twelve-week discovery project to help Google better understand its audience, their unique needs, and what Google could offer them. This Discovery work informed the design and strategy for the Google for Small Business website.

Screenshots of a website showing steps to create a business online, including getting a web address and professional email, with options for Google Domains and Workspace.
A business growth infographic illustrating five stages: Seed, Start, Nurture, Polish, and Evolve. Each stage features icons and illustrations showing activities like identifying opportunities, getting started, establishing a niche, shifting business models, and growing.
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Heuristic Analysis + App Redesign

Lead Designer, User Researcher

Uncovering UX opportunites & improving the customer experience

MuniBilling is a utility billing software suite that needed to build a roadmap of experience improvements, so as to be more appealing and aligned with the needs of their customer base and upcoming partners.

Screenshots of a bill payment app showing account details, payment form, and confirmation receipt for a bill totaling $48.11.
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Three smartphone screens displaying a health and wellness website called Nutritious Life. The first screen shows a welcome message and a call to action button. The second screen features an article about nurturing yourself with a motivational image of a woman stretching. The third screen contains a testimonial quote from Mercedes Vargas, a chef and certified Nutritious Life coach, with a portrait of her and a button to learn more about the program.
Multiple overlapping webpage screenshots featuring health, wellness, and nutrition content, including articles, workshops, and motivational sections, with images of people exercising, working on laptops, and engaging in wellness activities.

Design System

UX Design and Product Owner

More cohesive UX, faster development & team alignment

This Modular Design System was developed to support multiple brands under the Empowered Education umbrella. Efficient design and development, consistent user experience, and scalable creation of websites and landing pages were core outcomes.

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Website Redesigns

Information Architecture, UX Design, Research & Brand Strategy

Optimized for conversion & brand experience

I’ve been involved in many website redesigns over the course of my career - and I still love doing this work. I design for optimal conversions AND brand experience, I love to design for the whole digital ecosystem.

Screenshot of Nutritious Life website homepage featuring an invitation to live a healthier life, with images of a woman doing yoga, a bowl of salad, and a woman speaking outdoors.
Three smartphone screens displaying webpages about a full body systems functional nutrition training program, featuring text, images of women, and a request info button.
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Design & Research

Processes

Two women working at a table with a laptop, notebooks, and a jar of pencils.

  • I've implemented research regimes to inform early design phases of a product, as well as measure usability and performance during iteration.

  • I am adept and designing, conducting, synthesizing, and reporting on research.

    I have used research to clarify audience and provide audience insights, inform product direction, align internal teams on roadmap priorities, and inform page-level design decisions.

  • I am adept and designing, facilitating, synthesizing, and reporting on qualitative interview sessions. In fact, interviewing is my favorite method for understanding the motivations, mental models, and emotional drivers of the users.

    Findings suggested refinements and quotes from the participants are woven together and presented to key stakeholders.

  • I have been involved in the creation of personas in a variety of roles. Utilizing market research, customer interviews, surveys, and observation to create robust profiles to support product development and customer journey refinements, or to serve internal brand and sales teams.

  • In early phases of new product development I've designed experiments to validate assumptions around product features, draft design principles, and validate design decisions early and often.

    I have also led and participated in Design Sprints for internal and external clients.

  • I've participated in planning efforts on large agile builds, and helped 12 development teams, across three locations, iron out process analytics while implementing agile UX.

    I have also participated in Agile Squad teams as a product designer and marketing product owner.

Ideation workshop in action.

Ideation workshop in action.

Interviews & Outputs - sample research findings deck that was presented to the product development team and the client.

Interviews & Outputs - sample research findings deck that was presented to the product development team and the client.

Personas - Created from a treasure trove of customer interviews, reviews, and testimonials. Created to showcase the breadth of ideal customers, give background on their needs, drivers, and desires, and curate existing brand content that would speak t

Personas - Created from a treasure trove of customer interviews, reviews, and testimonials. Created to showcase the breadth of ideal customers, give background on their needs, drivers, and desires, and curate existing brand content that would speak to them.

Card sorting method conducted with teachers, aides, and administrators, to prioritize the information architecture for a dashboard application and uncover whether those diverse users required unique dashboard configurations.

Card sorting method conducted with teachers, aides, and administrators, to prioritize the information architecture for a dashboard application and uncover whether those diverse users required unique dashboard configurations.

Service Design - map generated for an enterprise digital health & education service. Map acted as the spine for the product development roadmap. 


Service Design - map generated for an enterprise digital health & education service. Map acted as the spine for the product development roadmap. 


Service Design - in this exercise we are mapping student and teacher needs throughout the course of the day. This map takes into account environmental distractions and mediators that could be mitigated or enhanced with the use of appropriate technolo

Service Design - in this exercise we are mapping student and teacher needs throughout the course of the day. This map takes into account environmental distractions and mediators that could be mitigated or enhanced with the use of appropriate technologies.

Synthesis & Team Alignment in action.

Synthesis & Team Alignment in action.

Synthesis & Team Alignment via a virtual discovery workshop.

Synthesis & Team Alignment via a virtual discovery workshop.

Usability Testing - Lean usability testing framework for rapidly collecting data and quickly turning around actionable reports.

Usability Testing - Lean usability testing framework for rapidly collecting data and quickly turning around actionable reports.

Philosophy & Approach

I got into technology because I care about people. Because so much of modern life unfolds through digital experiences, I knew that I could make an impact. To me, design is about creating clarity, ease, and meaning in complex systems. At its best, technology is an exquisite tool.

My work is grounded in deep listening, systems thinking, and emotional intelligence. I love the process of surfacing context, synthesizing diverse perspectives, and shaping ideas into experiences that feel intuitive, inclusive, and human.

At its best, design brings people together: to understand what is, imagine what could be, and align around what truly serves. I’m especially drawn to work that supports wellbeing, learning, and personal growth — and I bring both rigor and care to every project I touch.

Two women in black dresses smiling and posing together at an outdoor gathering with a decorated table and brick wall background.

Oh, and I’m a functional foodie & educator

In addition to my experience design career, I am a Functional Nutrition counselor and educator, holistic health coach, and plant-forward functional foods chef. I am committed to working towards positive change at a micro and macro level.

S E E D is my nutrition and lifestyle consulting practice, a side business that I have nurtured for the past 10 years because I see gaps in our health systems that can be addressed with food, education, community connection and care. At S E E D, I design programs and experiences that help people to reconnect to their food, their bodies, and their natural rhythms in order to achieve optimal health. 

Through S E E D I have led hundreds of people through group programs and workshops, and have fed many via educational dinner experiences and functional food delivery services.

People gathered at a long outdoor table, raising their hands in celebration, with flowers and candles on the table, under hanging lights and mason jar lanterns, during daylight.
Six white bowls with gold rims containing beet salad with chopped beets and herbs, arranged on a gray surface with shadows.

If you’re still here:

Let’s Connect!

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