About me

At a glance

BACKGROUND:

I have been designing for 10+ years and have been leading teams through complex product design challenges for 7+ years. I am currently working as a Principal Product Designer at athenahealth. Being from New Jersey originally, I like to say that I've made the full "Jersey slide" (that is, several lane shifts in a row) from art to graphic design to web design to UX to product research—and I bring all of that thinking to whichever type of work I'm doing.

I have also studied Spanish extensively, and this background in language has especially drawn me to designing NLP-based experiences. These types of projects have been some of my favorite to work on because with new technologies there is often an opportunity to experiment with new design processes, and I've found there's a unique sense of excitement that brings the whole cross-functional team closer together.

SELECT Brands:

athenahealth, Bank of America, Goodyear, City Year, Samsonite, Visit Williamsburg, GORE-TEX, Gorton's Seafood, Massachusetts State Lottery, Cambridge Crossing, Central American Resource Center (CARECEN)

See my resume

Skills

CREATIVE & VISUAL

UI / UX, Graphic Design, Typography, Branding, Fine art background, Stationery & Event Design

RESEARCH, STRATEGY, & CORE UX

Usability testing, Audience research, Design Thinking, Behavioral Economics, Conversational UI

CREATIVE LEADERSHIP

Creative Leadership, Mentorship, Project Scoping, Stakeholder ManagementResourcing & Allocation, Recruiting & Hiring, Agile, Project management

INTERACTIVE & MOTION

Interaction design, Rapid prototyping, Motion design

TECHNICAL

HTML & CSS, JavaScript/JQuery, WordPress development & PHP

TOOLS

Figma, Sketch, Principle, Axure, Keynote, Adobe Creative Suite, InVision, lots of Post-Its | Qualtrics, Airtable, Dovetail

Talks & Articles

Chicago UX Camps

Winter 2023

Small visual design tweaks can dramatically improve the usability of your product. Whether your background is in UX or visual design, it always helps to have a handful of visual design principles to lean on when iterating on your designs; so this talk will go over a few rules of thumb, and then how to apply or even break those rules to create the best possible user experience for your users.

Watch the video

My consulting career at 7 years old

I like to joke that I grew up in an office. That’s because, well, I did. Around the time I was born, my mom opened ARCH2, Inc.—her own consulting firm in historic preservation. Translation: my childhood sandbox was filled with office supplies. So it only makes sense that by the time I was 7, my sister and I established our own historic preservation...

Inside DigitasLBi XD: Laura Materna, Experience Designer

Inside DigitasLBi XD is an interview series of the Boston XD team’s “Unicorn of the Month.”