About me

(I really enjoy answering questions with post-its.)

At a glance

BACKGROUND:

I am currently working as a Lead Designer at athenahealth. Being from New Jersey originally, I like to say that I've made the full Jersey slide 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.

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)

MY TYPICAL APPROACH:

As seen in the photo above, I enjoy putting post-its and other notes on walls. Audience research, customer journeys, user testing plans, back-end logic, leading a kick-off workshop… you name it, I will map it out if there's a nearby wall (or these days, a Mural board) available.
I'm a huge proponent of user testing, and a pretty happy camper when I get a chance to run a test.
I believe in finishing touches. I stick things out in bug logging and proofreading.

See my resume

Skills

CREATIVE & VISUAL

UI / UX, Graphic Design, Typography, Branding, Fine art background

RESEARCH, STRATEGY, & CORE UX

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

TECHNICAL

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

INTERACTIVE & MOTION

Interaction design, Rapid prototyping, Motion design

TOOLS

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

CREATIVE LEAD

Agile design, Project management, Mentorship, Creative leadership, Stakeholder management

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

What has advertising learned from social change?

Who can imagine Don Draper, gazing out the window of his corner office, casually saving the day with a smooth tagline about happiness… in the midst of today’s global pandemic and racial protests? He couldn’t. And that’s a good thing, even if it means...

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.”