Zak Weiland

Principal Product Designer, Mentor & CX Strategist

Work Experience

  • Principal Product Designer

    OJO Labs, May 2021 – Present · Austin, TX Austin, Texas

  • Senior Product Designer

    OJO Labs, Jun 2018 – May 2021 · 3 yrs Austin, Texas

  • Senior Full Stack UI/UX Designer

    Bright Health, Nov 2017 – Jun 2018 · 8 mos · Austin, TX Austin, Texas
    • Evangelize user research, customer interviews, and usability testing within startup.
    • Helping lead major redesigns of corporate and business websites, member hub product, and mobile app.

  • Lead Product Designer / User Experience (UX)

    Endurance International Group, Apr 2016 – Nov 2017 · 1yr 8 mos Austin, Texas
    • Lead designer tasked with redesigning suite of internal tools.
    • Conduct feature analysis, interview stakeholders, run usability tests, brainstorm, and generate new internal product features to help manage EIG’s 40+ brands.
    • Design, test, and implement better registration, product, and checkout flows for HostGator, iPage, BlueHost, and Domain.com.
    • Develop detailed component pattern libraries for each brand to reduce development cycle.

  • UX Research & Design Consultant

    Ambonare, Nov 2015 – Apr 2016 · 6 mos Austin, Texas
    • Brought in to help consult on an overhaul of the Texas State Libary Archives internal item management system.
    • Conduct usability testing with TSLAC team members, including accessibility testing with blind and hearing impaired users.
    • Inform and advise team on Agile and LEAN design processes.

  • User Experience Designer

    Lightburn Designs, Mar 2014 – Oct 2015 · 1 yr 8 mos Austin, Texas · Remote
    • Strategize user experience and user interactions with project managers and clients through group discussions, stakeholder interviews, and low fidelity prototyping.
    • Conduct competitive and heuristic analysis to help companies define their product goals.
    • Execute user research studies and create usability test-scripts. Sketch, design, and develop wireframes, prototypes, information architecture, user journey maps, user flow diagrams, and personas to convey user-sentiment and communicate business goals to development teams.
    • Produce product solutions in quick iterations to build and refine proposals with stakeholders for sign-off before development phases.
    • Generalize specific design components to help reduce development costs. Participate in quality assurance testing, bug bashes and post-launch usability testing to ensure that development adheres to design spec.

  • Senior UI/UX Designer & Developer / Art Director

    Lightburn Designs, Feb 2010 – Mar 2014 · 4 yrs 2 mos Milwaukee, Wisconsin
    • Designed and developed user interfaces, brand and user experience based on client business and technical requirements. Worked on a variety of digital marketing campaigns, ecommerce solutions and built custom web and mobile applications. Created design patterns & standards, evangelized User Experience best practices. Created working prototypes with html/css/js, wireframes, information architecture, sitemaps, and performed usability testing. Designed and built 3 native Appcelerator apps (iOS and Android). Mentored and art directed associate designers.

  • Senior Designer & Front-End Developer

    Fyin, Jan 2007 – Feb 2010 · 3 yrs Milwaukee, Wisconsin
    • Designed, art directed, and implemented interactive web applications using .NET and PHP. Managed a team of 10 junior designers and developers to implement large-scale ecommerce platforms and branding.

  • Web Designer

    UWSP-Web & Media Services, Jan 2005 – Dec 2006 · 1 yr 4 mos Stevens Point, Wisconsin
    • First web designer for the newly created department. Conducted first successful redesign of the university website in over 5 years. Communicated with administration through project presentations, digital tutorials and video communications. Assisted staff, faculty, and students with web pages, video projects, and Flash applications.

Education

  • University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point

    B.A. in Web & Digital Media Development, 2002 – 2006

Skillset

  • Design

    Visual Design, Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Prototyping, User Flows, Storyboards, Persona Development, Content Strategy, Usability Testing, Interviewing, Writing and Analyzing Surveys, Stakeholder Workshops, Mobile Design, Responsive Design, Competitive & Heuristic Analysis, Web Standards, UI Design, UI Animation, Illustration, and Needfinding.

  • Tools

    Figma, Miro, Whimsical, Sketch, Invision, Slack, 10+ years designing with Adobe Suite, nine years developing HTML/CSS/JS, .Net, PHP, Omnigraffle, Principle, UXPin, IA Writer, Office, Trello, Github, Appcelerator & PhoneGap, Confluence, Visual Studios, Sublime Text, Framer.js, jQuery. IMHO: As long as you can communicate the idea, the tools don't matter. :)

  • Development

    React, CSS, JS, HTML, and experience with popular frameworks for each language including SASS, LESS, Compass, Grunt, jQuery, CoffeeScript, Principle, and Framer Studio. Experience with SVN and Git. Extensive experience developing responsive sites and prototyping.

You can download a PDF version of my CV (39kb) here.