DESIGN & BUILD
Hello. I’m Chris. I live in Oakland, California. Read detailed stories and case studies about things I’ve designed and built over on the Work page, or, if you just want the basics, read on.
Currently, I’m a Principal Designer at HOVER Inc. leading work on design systems. I work hand-in-hand with a crack front-end engineer and the design team to deliver tooling and assets that make the lives of HOVER’s designers and developers easier. This work supports a bold product strategy by allowing teams to make big new bets with less risk and greater efficiency, delivering more value to our customers.
In 2019 and 2020, I worked with San Francisco Digital Services as a Senior UX Designer working on the Housing team, extending and improving the DAHLIA Housing Portal ecosystem of software that helps San Franciscans find and apply for affordable housing. The DS Housing team works with The Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development and their stakeholders to deliver software and services that materially improve the lives of folks in our community.
From late 2015 to late 2019, I was at Coursera, first as a Senior Product Designer and then as a Principal Designer, working on their mission to transform lives through education. For a year in 2018-2019, I worked in design management, leading the Partner Design team, a squad making kick-ass authoring and administration tools for instructors, instructional designers, and admins at our university partners.
For most of 2015 I kept busy doing freelance design and coding work for a variety of clients, including the Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission (a mobile-first redesign of their 511 tool), The University of California’s Berkeley Language Center (converting their media distribution tools to mobile-friendly HTML5), and others.
In 2014 I led the Mobile team as a Product Designer at Piazza, a Q&A platform for academic use, chosen by over 30,000 professors at more than 1,000 schools. I introduced the firm to user-centered design processes and did everything from UX research to prototyping to pixel-perfect mockups. The completely redesigned iOS and Android apps saw a 25% term-over-term jump in sessions per user per day.
From 2010-2103, I was Lead Product Designer and Front-end Engineer for the civic tech app Neighborland, a communications platform that empowers organizations to collaborate with their stakeholders in an accessible, participatory, and equitable way.
I started my career in tech in 2000 at UC’s Berkley Language Center, where I worked for 10 years. My biggest impact was via doing UX/UI and visual design plus full-stack engineering for the Library of Foreign Language Film Clips (now known as Lumiere), a web app that serves over 10,000 film clips in 50 languages to language instructors and students at 60 colleges and universities across 3 continents.
In the past I’ve also made music, engineered audio recordings, and done graphic design for print. Sometimes, I make visual art and design furniture. Though busy, I always try to find time to write short-form nonsense. Thanks for stopping by.