Welcome

UX

Designing for Trust

I specialize in bringing humanity to high-stakes tools. By harmonizing the needs of people, business strategy, and complex systems, I drive teams towards solutions customers can trust, so that businesses can win.

Case Studies

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Approach

I thrive on hard problems. Forging complex technical power into user confidence and business outcomes requires a purposeful and thoughtful approach. My approach focuses on cross-functional facilitation, and building trust at every step of the process.

1. Set the Foundation

For teams to move forward together, they need a shared common ground of understanding.

2. Ideate Objectively

When strong opinions across many teams becomes a challenge, a hypothesis mindset adds humility to the equation.

3. Fail Fast & Forward

Test hypotheses with rapid, decisive feedback loops, by any means possible.

4. Give a Damn

Quality of craft comes from the heart. Ensure quality through thoroughness and extreme ownership.

5. Glide Through the Storms

There are always challenges and curveballs. Reflect, learn, then focus on the future.

Methods

As a life-long learner, I employ a T-shaped approach: deep UX expertise complemented by broad skills in engineering, research, and strategy. These are the methods and tools that I use the most:

Alignment

Frameworks

Shared strategic frameworks and principles align teams what to focus on, what not to, and where our areas of improvement are.

System Models

Spreadsheets and words only go so far; models align teams on key 'things', how they relate, and the verbs that connect them.

Workshops

Whether remote or in-person, workshops strengthen camaraderie, reduce friction, and drive rapid alignment.

Writing

Writing ideas succinctly ensures teams maintain a clear signal.

Innovation

Research

Everything starts with research. For me, it isn't just a set of studies – it's a lifestyle of seeking to understand.

Vision Prototyping

Visions suspend immediate limitations to drive discussion around what’s possible, plausible, and probable given various levels of investment.

Mode Switching

Translating ideas between paper, whiteboards, AI prompting, Figma, and code. Each transition forces our brains to rethink ideas.

Rapid Ideation

I go broad with my ideation (Crazy 8’s-style), arranging ideas clearly so that the influences, tradeoffs, and rationale are as clear as possible.

Delivery

Scrum Involvement

Design must be represented in an ongoing way throughout the scrum process. Working closely with engineers is one of my highest priorities on any project.

Quality Assurance

From interactions down to token implementation, I work hand-in-hand with engineers to ensure design intent is captured accurately.

Engineering Fluency

My roots are in engineering. At minimum, designers must be conversant in technical details, just like building architects are conversant in material properties.

Broader Impact

Mentorship

I’m actively involved in design mentorship. It helps me stay in tune with newer generations of designers, give back to the community, and refine my ideas.

Teaching

As a co-instructor for IU’s Luddy HCI program, I recently guided a cohort of design students through their senior capstone, anchored in real business use-cases.

Community

In this post-COVID era, I’m actively seeking to build quality connections with designers, product, and engineers in the Chicagoland area and abroad.

Endorsements

I’ve collaborated and have been Eric’s manager for several years, and came to know him for his unique combination of a far-looking, pattern-seeking visionary, and a hands-on proliferous craftsman.

Eric demonstrated relentless passion and drive to produce the best outcomes while creating authentic and productive relationships. He’s surpassed time & cultural differences and organizational silos, always showing both personal resilience as well as diplomacy and empathy to his partners. He’s been exceptional in learning new areas of product, client and business needs and applying that learning to innovate and advocate for the user experience. With his positivity he naturally brings people together and drives them toward a shared purpose. This allowed him to leveraged his skills and passion beyond his personal deliverables, multiplying his impact with PM and UX partners in and across teams.

As part of my team but also years later, Eric remained a trusted partner serving as a bridge and translator between teams, products, timezones and cultures. An amazing asset wherever he goes.

Tamar Akavia (Manager at Salesforce)

Eric is and will always be an anchor designer. He is a strong and trusted professional you can build a team and a product around.

We worked together as peers and while I led the design team at Marketing Cloud.

Eric is an incredible framework thinker with an innate adaptability that isn’t easily taught. He worked on our most central system object – the Marketing Cloud Campaign – and developed layers of systemic design frameworks to help platform partner teams integrate seamlessly into it and marketing users understand it on day 1, 10, and 100 with increasing clarity and sophistication.

His product manager partners truly LOVE him. When we were peers, I took over a project he began. His PM was so deeply saddened at his absence that I was concerned I might not live up to his ability. When I later led the team, his Campaigns PM partner messaged me frequently and unsolicited expressing how his deep impact shaped their current efforts and future release planning. His ability to adapt to winds of change has led to him overcoming numerous challenges where the product organization required fast action and confident decisions that support engineering feasibility. In these moments many designers might show a sense of concern or cut corners to try and move quickly in support of the business more than the user, yet Eric remained focused their needs, context and outcomes all while exuding joy, optimism and confidence that’s simply contagious.

Eric is not just an excellent designer and a joy to work with; he makes those around him better. He is quick and deep with his critiques and sought out for his opinions and mentorship. He will work harder to ensure those around him have clarity of thought and efficiency of process. He brings a passion of design and a playful demeanor that elevates his work and his teams.

Craig Birchler (Manager at Salesforce)

Eric is an amazing UX designer and excellent problem solver. We brought him in to consult at a very early stage with our company to design our UX and wireframes, and his creative ability shown through with the questions he asked and solutions that he delivered. His work set a strong foundation for our product and is still being used today. Not only did Eric deliver beyond what we expected, but he took the time to create a strong relationship in the process and showed true care for our product, team, and company’s vision. Eric is a trustworthy, personable, and reliable guy that we make sure to keep in touch with and will always recommend.

Matt Weirich (Freelance Client; Founder at ReaLync)

Eric is an extremely creative, dependable, hard working, and honest individual. He formed the cornerstone of our user experience design team and produced tremendous work under great pressure (startup mode). With a skill set ranging from user experience architecture through to interactive wireframing, graphic design, and front-end development he really is a swiss army knife and a great asset to have on any software or product development team. It was truly a pleasure to have the opportunity to work with Eric and I would hire him again in a heartbeat.