I love creating, designing, and telling stories through dynamic, aesthetically pleasing, user-centric applications and web pages.
As a United States Air Force Veteran, integrity first, service before self, and excellence in all I do are at the core of who I am and what I strive to embody every day.
My professional journey has been a winding and adventurous one. From the baseball diamonds of Texas to the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, every moment and lesson learned has led me to this moment as I embark on my next great adventure...
The first 25 years of my life were spent playing baseball at the highest levels of competition. Hard work, discipline, tenacity, resilience, team work... all of these attributes, and many more, became the bedrock and foundation of my life.
After baseball, I poured myself into the coffee industry for eight years as a barista/manager. The first five years spent with Starbucks stirred in me a great passion for serving people at a level they'd never experienced before. The words "dignity" and "respect" became the very essence of my day to day interactions with the many customers and co-workers I came to know as friends.
There's an amazing story here... but, suffice to say, the Air Force provided an opportunity for me to "change my stars." My father and grandfather had served before me, and I wanted to continue that legacy as well as provide a better future for my family. During my four years of being stationed at the Air Force Academy I learned what it truly means to put service before self.
Upon leaving the Air Force I knew I wanted to pursue a career in creative design, and Nashville Software School provided that opportunity. It is now my aim to take everything I've learned during my time at NSS and embark upon this exciting new chapter as I pursue a career of excellence and adventure in UI/UX Design... "Further up and further in!"
UI/UX Design is about more than beautiful web pages and applications... it's about the user. From initial strategy to product launch, here are the skills I've acquired during my time at NSS and the processes I've learned and developed along the way...
This phase is all about defining a project's scope and priorities, realizing the project vision, crafting the budget, brand strategy, and content inventory, as well as doing heuristic evaluation and competitive analysis.
Solid research is crucial to getting the design "just right." Surveying, ethnographic field studies, focus groups and user interviews, as well as personas are all a part of this phase.
This goes hand-in-hand with research and includes user scenarios, mental models, sitemaps, navigation, labeling, use cases and user experience maps, workflows, goals, and tasks, and UX architecture.
My favorite phase of the process, this includes wireframes, user flows, stories, and scenarios, interactive prototypes, visual design and identity, quantitative and qualitative user research, as well as remote UX research.
This is where the magic happens: HTML/CSS frontend development. Making the design a reality... and, perhaps, fine-tuning along the way.
Along with HTML/CSS development and the "cutting of the red tape", the launch phase includes documentation and hand-off, as well as post-production usabilty studies to ensure things continue to run smoothly.
The perfect cup of coffee, an inspirational quote, and the daily forecast... preferably in that order!
Currently, the Homepage and Journal (book and quill icons) are the only features available for prototyping.
An all-in-one desktop application allowing users to keep a record of their life for personal use now, and a legacy for those who come after.
