Product & UX Design

Hi, I'm Gabe. My mission is to create products that people love by understanding how humans interact with the world around them. I've been at the forefront of the UX field for the last decade as a generalist developing a mastery across the product / UX / UI / visual design spectrum.

My Approach

I believe that design is often as much about asking the right questions as it is about coming up with solutions. My approach to any project will follow a similar pattern, by starting with some questions:

What is the problem we’re trying to solve?
What do we know about the user and their circumstances?
What data do we have available? Should we conduct more research?
What is our objective, and how are we going to gauge results?

After answering these questions and creating a clear problem statement & objective, I'll design a product or feature that solves the needs of the user. I strive for simplicity and consistency in my designs, and place a high importance on copywriting. Once I’ve worked with engineering to build, test, and ship, we get to find out how well we did by tracking our success metrics. Check out some of my work below.

The Divergent Needs of Employers & Job Seekers

As head of design at Poached Jobs I work with a small & fast moving product/engineering team. Our job is to understand the hiring and job hunting needs in the food & drink industry, and create software that works for both employers and job seekers.

Onboarding Consumers & Visualizing Big Data

I started at Janrain as the first designer in an early stage startup. I then hired and managed a team to support a rapidly growing engineering organization. In 2019 Janrain was purchased for $125M. While we worked on consumer facing UX, much of our work was based on the needs of our enterprise clients.

Helping Consumers Save Money

This was a prototype of a new product for a credit union. Their goals were to attract and retain dollars from members by encouraging them to save, to teach financially healthy behaviors to increase loyalty in the future, and to attract new members with an enticing experience.

How 28,000 Developers Feel About the State of the Web

Mozilla sponsored a survey of more than 28,000 developers and designers from 169 countries to help understand their pain points, wants, and needs. Pinpoint conducted the study, which included 10,000 hours of input from the community, wrote the report, and commissioned me to design it.

TheCrag.com

theCrag.com hired me to design and prototype an iOS app. I started by documenting how rock climbers would want to interact with an app on their phone at the cliff. Using that framework I created a user-centered design that would help climbers optimize their time out climbing.

dlvr.it

At dlvr.it I worked with the founder to reimagine and redesign the successful social media automation tool to move the product from RSS feeds to the modern era of social media. I then worked with the dev team to build and ship the refreshed product.

Journey Mapping

This project involved creating customer experience and journey mapping visuals for a major tech organization based on the data from a large research project.

Climbing Guidebooks

I created two small guidebooks to cover undocumented climbing areas in Washington state. The project involved climbing many unknown routes, photographing the cliffs, drawing maps, and describing the approaches for an audience unfamiliar with the area.

Backpacks

Unable to find the exact backpack I wanted I worked through a cycle of designing and prototyping packs until arriving at a satisfactory result. I manufactured / sewed a dozen of them and put them to work in the field. Some of my packs have survived years of abuse including a thru hike of the pacific crest trail.