The CNN Election Center served as the digital centerpiece for the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, engaging millions of users with real-time election results, interactive maps, and data visualizations. As a lead designer and product design manager, I led the end-to-end design process, ensuring the platform delivered an intuitive, accessible, and engaging experience that met both user needs and business objectives.
Product Design Leadership: Directed the design of the Election Center web experience, collaborating with cross-functional teams to tell the story of the election with real-time data, interactive maps, and dynamic storytelling modules tailored to diverse user needs.
Subject Matter Expertise: Supported non-web teams, including Digital Magic Wall, CTV apps, live story, and the homepage, ensuring design consistency and scalability across platforms.
Stakeholder Management: Aligned diverse stakeholders, including editorial, engineering, and product teams, around a unified design vision.
Designing a platform to handle the complexity of election night required creating a compelling user experience that converted the massive scale of CNN.com visitors into more engaged users by making the election results and their significance easier to understand. The solution needed to:
We were challenged to increase user engagement through storytelling and clear contextualization of election events in an intuitive and accessible manner, all while maintaining design consistency across desktop and mobile web, mobile app, and connected TV platforms.
To build a foundation for the Election Center, we began with a deep dive into user behavior and past challenges. This phase focused on understanding user needs and identifying opportunities for innovation.
We ran various design thinking sessions with the larger cross-functional team such as this content framing exercise to identify user questions and needs early in the ideation phase. By prioritizing key areas like local election results and emerging trends, we ensured our designs aligned with audience expectations while addressing business goals.
With a clear understanding of user needs, we defined a comprehensive strategy to guide the design process. This phase emphasized delivering clarity and ensuring users could access the information they needed quickly and intuitively.
This journey map outlines our strategic planning process, mapping out how content was delivered at key phases of the election to guide users seamlessly from discovery to in-depth analysis. By aligning with election subject matter experts and our editorial partners, we ensured the most relevant information surfaced at the right time, helping users stay engaged and informed
Prototyping and testing were critical to refining the Election Center. We used iterative feedback cycles to ensure a user-friendly and easily navigable design.
By creating a design architecture in Figma using variables and variants and leveraging the larger CNN design system, we rapidly built and iterated on prototypes like these, enabling efficient collaboration with stakeholders and swift usability testing. Feedback loops helped refine navigation, accessibility, and overall user experience, ensuring the Election Center was optimized to meet the needs of millions on Election Day.
The final phase focused on turning designs into reality through close collaboration with developers, editorial teams, product, and stakeholders.
Executing on election night required seamless coordination across editorial, product, and engineering teams at CNN. By leveraging a unified design vision and maintaining close collaboration throughout development, we ensured consistent, real-time delivery of features like results maps, voting data visualizations, and interactive storytelling tools for millions of users on one of the most pivotal nights in news coverage.
Nearly a year of meticulous preparation and strategic planning culminated in one of the most successful election nights ever on CNN.com, marked by seamless execution and unparalleled audience engagement.
The success of the 2024 Election Center has set a new standard for election coverage at CNN. By coordinating across teams and leveraging insights from months of user research, we engaged 12 million users on Election Day and maintained high levels of interaction throughout Election Week. The seamless integration of storytelling, real-time updates, and intuitive navigation underscored our ability to meet user needs at critical moments. Moving forward, I’m excited to continue leveraging design to solve complex challenges and create products that scale seamlessly for diverse audiences.
As part of the Web Foundations team at CNN, I played a pivotal role in enhancing the design system to support the redesign of the CNN.com homepage and article pages. This effort focused on creating reusable UI kits and component libraries that streamlined the design process, ensuring that designers could conceptualize ideas faster while accurately reflecting how pages would render on the CMS used for publishing. By closely integrating the design system with engineering workflows, I ensured seamless transitions from design to production, fostering efficiency and consistency.
The primary goal was to enhance the design system to support the Web Foundations team, enabling them to deliver high-quality, scalable solutions for CNN.com’s most critical pages.
Through the use of variables and variants in Figma, we empowered designers to quickly mock up concepts for the homepage and article redesigns and rapidly test new ideas and gain stakeholder alignment. We also trained designers on creating new components that worked within the new design system architecture to allow the system to continue to scale for use on other teams within the larger design org.
I focused on prioritizing the designer experience by understanding their needs and creating reusable components, along with integrating Figma token and component libraries, to support their goals and enhance efficiency.
Creating components to work in the new design system architecture's variants and variables was an adjustment for designers and required training and close collaboration across the team. Through mentorship and hands-on support, the team embraced the system, recognizing the long-term benefits of improved efficiency and downstream effects as designs moved into production.
A seamless integration between the design system and production workflows was critical for ensuring consistency across CNN’s digital experiences.
Working with the engineering team, we were able to create a toolchain system that allowed published changes from the Figma file to get pulled in to production code, ensuring that changes to the design system reflect in production automatically. This required close collaboration with engineering from the earliest phases to carefully plan the strategy of aligning the Figma variable and component names to the corresponding code in production.
The design system enhancements delivered significant value across CNN.com’s homepage and article redesign projects. Key results include:
This initiative underscored the importance of close collaboration between design and engineering, meticulous documentation, and fostering a systems-first mindset. By bridging the gap between design and production, I helped create a scalable, efficient process that met the needs of both designers and developers.
Virtru provides email encryption solutions to protect sensitive data and ensure secure communication. However, the complexity of email encryption can be a barrier to user adoption. As a senior product designer at Virtru, I led the redesign of their core email encryption product to simplify the user experience, improve clarity, and drive wider adoption.
Design strategy: Developed a user-centered design strategy that aligned with business goals and user needs.
UI design & design thinking: Designed clear and concise user flows and interactions to guide users seamlessly through the product.
Cross-functional partnership: Collaborated closely with cross-functional teams, including product management and engineering, to ensure successful implementation.
Email encryption is often perceived as technically complex and cumbersome. Users need to understand the benefits of encryption and how to use it effectively without feeling overwhelmed. The existing Virtru product, while functional, lacked intuitive design and clear user guidance, hindering broader adoption. To improve the product experience, several key changes needed to happen:
The Secure Reader redesign process was comprehensive, beginning with a detailed heuristic analysis to identify pain points and areas for improvement. From there, I explored and iterated on potential solutions via wireframes and prototyping, followed by development and delivery to ensure a seamless and user-friendly product experience.
The first stage focused on understanding the users and defining a clear design strategy to address their needs:
This user journey map visualizes the intricate and multi-step process involved in Virtru's email encryption product. By mapping out the complexities in detail, we gained a clear understanding of pain points and areas of friction, guiding our efforts to simplify the user experience and streamline the encryption workflow. This foundational analysis was crucial in identifying opportunities to make the product more intuitive and accessible for users.
The next phase involved generating ideas and validating design concepts through user feedback:
To simplify the complex process of securely opening, reading, and replying to encrypted messages, we carefully designed a streamlined user flow. This journey clarified why the recipient was sent a secure message, provided intuitive instructions for accessing it, and ensured an effortless, secure response experience. The iterative design and testing process honed these steps to maximize user comprehension and engagement.
Finally, the focus shifted to delivering the redesigned product and making final adjustments based on feedback:
Through iterative feedback, we identified the need to refine the onboarding experience and address edge cases, such as expired messages, ensuring clarity for users in all scenarios. Additionally, we collaborated with engineering to implement a cohesive set of components based on the design system, enabling a consistent and polished user experience across the product.
The redesigned Virtru email encryption product was very well-received during usability testing. Here's what we observed:
This project reinforced the importance of user-centered design in simplifying products as complex as encryption and making them accessible to a wider audience. By focusing on user needs and pain points, I was able to create a design solution that improved usability, clarity, and the likelihood of product adoption.
Contactually, a B2B real estate CRM platform, served as a critical tool for realtors and real estate agents to maintain relationships with clients and potential clients and help to prevent leads from going cold. As a senior product designer, I played a pivotal role in designing administrative interfaces to help administrators onboard users effectively and track their performance. Additionally, I designed the ScaleMail feature, which streamlined real estate agent workflows and enabled them to send email campaigns to leads and potential home buyers and sellers. This two-pronged approach led to higher adoption by agents and increased the perceived value of the platform for all users.
B2B Product Design: Designed and refined the B2B administrative interface, catering to the specific needs of real estate professionals and partner businesses.
User-Centered Design: Focused on user research and iterative testing to ensure the product met the needs of both administrators and real estate agents.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Worked closely with product managers, engineers, and stakeholders to align design solutions with business objectives and user needs.
The challenge was to optimize the experience for the administrators of Contactually customers while ensuring their agents adopted the platform. We also needed to develop features that improved the workflows of real estate professionals and drive value of the platform. To achieve this, we needed to:
The original Contactually administrative dashboard provided limited insights, failing to offer administrators an at-a-glance view of key metrics or actionable areas for improvement. This lack of clarity made it challenging for administrators to monitor adoption, track engagement, and identify opportunities to optimize their teams' use of the platform.
To ensure the designs addressed the most pressing challenges, we began with an in-depth exploration of user needs and workflows:
Two of the concepts we developed for administrators and for real estate agents based on initial research. The first concept visualizes a data-driven dashboard to help administrators identify high-performing and underperforming lead generation channels, empowering them to focus efforts where they matter most. The second concept showcases a new feature called ScaleMail, with templates designed to streamline real estate agents' most common workflows by guiding them through sending email campaigns.
Once the research was complete, the focus shifted to creating and iterating on design concepts that directly addressed user pain points:
The redesigned administrative dashboard incorporates customer feedback, enabling administrators to easily identify users who haven't completed onboarding steps, compare their performance to organizational benchmarks at a glance, and monitor user activity trends over time—providing actionable insights to enhance platform adoption and engagement.
We enhanced the ScaleMail feature set based on user testing to introduce user-generated tags for better contact organization, a recent engagement score based on real-time platform metrics, and a predictive tool that suggests the best time to email contacts, empowering real estate agents to optimize their communication and maximize lead engagement.
Finally, the design concepts were brought to life through close collaboration with engineering and ongoing validation:
Collaborating closely with engineering teams, we rigorously tested and refined the final version of ScaleMail to ensure its reliability and scalability. This partnership resulted in a feature that could confidently handle the demands of high-volume email campaigns, providing real estate agents with a robust tool for engaging with their contacts efficiently.
By designing tools that streamlined onboarding processes, increased agent engagement, and reducing time to proficiency, we were able to increase adoption of the platform for our customers as well as drive up user engagement with valuable new features.
This project underscored the importance of understanding the specific needs of B2B customers and developing features that drive the perceived value of a growing product with those customers. By focusing on solving the right problems and cross-functional collaboration, we delivered a solution that improved efficiency and user satisfaction.
I'm a Denver-based product designer passionate about solving complex problems that scale. I bring UX leadership and best practices to organizations while fostering collaboration and innovation.
Outside of work, I'm a big gamer and like keeping up with the latest tech. I enjoy photography, cooking, and spending time with my wife and three kids.