About me

 

Aloha, I’m Janelle! I’m a user experience designer with a passion for life experiences.

Born and raised in Hawaii, I grew up with a love of mountains and the great outdoors. I currently reside in Austin, TX where you can find me working on my next DIY home project or training for some random sports competition.

Experience

Senior UX Designer, IBM Watson Assistant

Lead designer for the products mission to drive growth within Watson Assistant. Responsible for improving the discoverability and consumability of Watson Assistant for new and existing customers so that they can launch their assistant in reduced time with greater ease of use.

  • Create strategy for the product. Run design thinking sessions with product management and development to ideate towards user driven solutions. Roadmap with leadership to hit company objectives and business outcomes.

  • Define the user experience through journey mapping, user flows, wireframe, prioritization grids, etc. Articulate user goals and outcomes with stakeholders.

  • Create alignment across disciplines within the squad as well as alignment amongst other squads. Facilitate meetings and run agile practices throughout our sprint cadences (scrum, grooming, sprint planning, checkins, and retro).

  • Collaborate across all product squads to establish a comprehensive set of UX patterns, components, and guidelines for usage across the product. Facilitate alignment with designers for a consistent design pattern and facilitate alignment with developers to utilize a consistent dev component.

  • Continuously gather feedback. User test design iterations by conducting research plans, run testing sessions, synthesize research, and present findings with data-driven recommendations.

Design Team Lead and UX Designer, IBM Cloud Infrastructure

Provided guidance and direction to a team of 3-4 designers while carrying on responsibilities as an individual contributor. Helped our team deliver results on a multi-million dollar portfolio such as increasing provisioning conversions for Virtual Servers by 387% and Bare Metal by 118% as well as winning the 2019 Australia Good Design Award for our suite of VPC products.

Education

Texas A&M University

Master of Science, Visualization, 2015

DePauw University

Bachelor of Arts, Computer Science major with a minor in Studio Art, 2011

Westminster University

Study abroad program, 2010

Notable achievements

IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement
2020

Patent pending: Dynamic order prioritization enablement
Filed January 2020

Australia Good Design Award winner
2019

Patent pending: Assistance management system
Filed September 2019

Speaker at Big Design in Dallas, Texas
August 2019

Speaker at A11y Camp in Sydney, Australia
November 2019

Speaker at IBM Think Conference
February 2019

Speaker at Big Design Conference in Dallas, Texas
September 2017