SENIOR UX, PRODUCT
& BRAND DESIGNER

Senior Designer blending UX, product, and brand to make complex digital experiences clearer and more scalable.

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CASE STUDIES

FEATURED PROJECTS

CASE STUDY I

A selection of my other work

PROJECT

Designing a Learning Experience for Both Sides of Training

CBT NuggetsUX/Product Design

Role

Lead UX and Visual Designer

Scope

Product UX, trainer workflows, content systems, reporting, and team learning tools.

Impact

Helped define the product foundation for Adept, a new training platform created within CBT Nuggets.

Context

Technical training is already demanding, so the platform needed to reduce friction instead of adding more complexity. The learning experience had to feel clear, focused, and easy to return to, while still supporting progress, team learning, reporting, and other tools around the lesson itself. At the same time, trainers needed better ways to create, edit, review, and manage the content learners depended on. That made the project more than a learning app. It became a dual-sided product experience for two connected groups, where the needs of learners and trainers had to work together inside one cohesive system.

Users

The product needed to support two connected user groups with very different goals. Learners needed clear progress, easier lesson recovery, motivation, team learning support, and less friction when returning to training. Trainers needed fast content creation, easier editing, review workflows, visibility, and tools that supported how they actually built training.

Signals

Personas, trainer feedback, and pain points helped show what the product actually needed to support. Learners needed the experience to feel clearer and easier to return to, while trainers needed tools that matched the way they really created, edited, and reviewed content. The main signal was that adding more features was not the answer. The bigger need was to reduce friction across the training experience so both sides could move through their work with less confusion.

Constraints

The design direction was shaped by a few core principles that helped keep the experience focused as the platform expanded. Learning needed to stay central, even as features like chat, reports, progress tracking, and team tools were introduced around it. The system also had to support very different user modes, from learners moving through lessons to trainers creating, reviewing, and managing content. Because many of the internal tools were used by expert users, the workflows needed depth and speed without becoming visually overwhelming.

PROJECT PROOF

Design proof across the core experience

Home

The strongest part of this project was not a single screen. It was the way the same product logic carried across different workflows: learning, reporting, team collaboration, content creation, review, moderation, and career growth. Because the platform had to serve both learners and trainers, every major feature had to answer the same question: how do we give users more capability without making the experience harder to understand? This section breaks down the main design decisions, what informed them, and how they supported the final experience.

Pain point
Learners needed access to progress, notes, chat, reports, and supporting tools, but every added feature risked pulling them away from the lesson.

Intent
Let users do more without losing their place in the training.

What I designed
I kept the training experience anchored in the right two-thirds of the screen and designed supporting actions into the left one-third. That left panel could flex for navigation, notes, chat, reports, team tools, or trainer actions while the lesson remained visible.

Why
The lesson was the core experience. Everything else needed to support it, not compete with it. By keeping training persistently visible, users could move through secondary tasks without feeling like they had exited the learning flow.

What worked
This split-screen model gave the product a clear organizing principle. It made the platform feel more powerful without making it feel scattered. Learners could reference the lesson while taking action, and trainers could build or review content while staying connected to the final learning experience.

Reports

Reports had to do more than show data. The experience needed to help learners understand their progress, recognize what they had already completed, and find the next useful step without feeling overwhelmed. This section shows how the reports flow organized accomplishments, scores, completed training, and deeper details into a structure learners could actually use.

Pain point
Most reporting systems focus on raw information, but technical learning is emotional too. Learners needed a way to see what they had accomplished, measure improvement over time, and feel encouraged to continue training instead of feeling buried in analytics.

Intent
Design a reporting experience that felt motivating, easy to navigate, and connected to the learner’s sense of progress.

What I designed
The flow focused on accomplishment first. Learners could review completed training, validated minutes, module progress, and practice exam scores, then compare results against past work. I created a reporting flow that moved from quick progress summaries into deeper details when needed. Learners could view completions, check scores, manage automated reports, and access more specific lesson or module data without the page feeling overloaded.

Why
Technical training can feel long and difficult, so the reports experience needed to create a sense of momentum. The goal was to make learners feel proud of the work they had already done while giving them useful next-step information. The structure became more focused as the flow evolved. Instead of showing every possible data point at once, the design prioritized high-level accomplishments first, then let learners drill into more detailed reporting when they needed it.

What worked
The final concept made reporting feel less like an admin area and more like a progress checkpoint. It gave learners a clearer view of their effort, improvement, and completed training, which supported the larger goal of keeping them engaged.

Team Learning

Team Learning had to make shared training feel easier to manage without turning the learner experience into an admin tool. The goal was to support collaboration, visibility, and accountability while keeping the lesson itself clear and focused. This section shows how the team experience connected individual learning, shared progress, and group-level visibility inside the same product system.

Pain point
Group learning could easily turn the product into a meeting tool instead of a training experience. The system needed to support live discussion, scheduling, video, audio, chat, moderators, public sessions, private sessions, and recurring study groups, but the lesson still had to remain the reason users were there.

Intent
Create a shared learning experience where users could join the same lesson, learn together, and manage the session without losing their place. The flows explored different ways to start, join, schedule, browse, or moderate a session while supporting roles like trainers, moderators, and participants.

What I designed
I designed the team learning experience around a flexible left-side workspace for chat, members, video controls, session options, scheduling, and moderation tools while keeping the lesson visible on the larger right side of the screen.

Why
The goal was to make collaboration feel like part of learning, not a distraction from it. As the flow expanded, it needed to support public and private sessions, moderated and unmoderated groups, one-time and recurring sessions, and moderator actions like adding members, assigning another moderator, stepping down, or leaving a session open for volunteers.

What worked
The final concept gave Team Learning structure without making it rigid. It supported casual study groups, trainer-led sessions, public discovery, private invites, and live collaboration while keeping the training page anchored. The lesson stayed central, and everything else worked around it.

Jobs

Jobs connected the learning experience to what users were working toward outside the platform. The goal was to make career growth feel tied to training, not separate from it. Because learners were building skills for real technical roles, the experience needed to help them understand how their progress could connect to job paths, role requirements, and next steps. It had to feel useful without turning the product into a job board. This section shows how the Jobs experience created a bridge between training progress, skill-building, and career direction.

Pain point
Most learning platforms stop at course completion. Learners can earn certifications or complete lessons, but they still have to figure out how to translate those accomplishments into something meaningful for employers. The goal of the Jobs experience was to bridge that gap.

Intent
Create a career support system where learners could turn training progress, certifications, validated skills, and completed content into evidence for real job opportunities. The early flows explored how learning data could support resumes, expertise tracking, job comparison, opportunity search, and recommendations based on completed skills and certifications, while giving employers deeper proof of expertise beyond a traditional resume.

What I designed
I designed a career-focused experience that connected learning progress directly to professional growth. The system included resume-building tools, skill and certification tracking, expertise validation, job recommendations based on completed training, “almost qualified” job matching, suggested learning paths for missing skills, job comparison tools, resume export and sharing, portfolio attachments, badges, transcripts, certifications, and optional video introductions.

Why
The intent was to make learning feel connected to a larger outcome. Many users were training to improve their careers, qualify for new roles, or prove technical expertise, so the recommendation system helped them understand which jobs they qualified for now and what additional training could move them toward future opportunities. The employer side also explored how hiring managers could see deeper evidence of completed training and validated skills instead of relying only on static resumes.

What worked
As the flows evolved, the system expanded from simple job listings into a broader career ecosystem focused on skill matching, certification alignment, close-skill gaps, flexible resume tools, and future employer integrations. The final concept positioned training progress, certifications, badges, and expertise as practical tools learners could use to build credibility, confidence, and career mobility.

Trainer Studio

Trainer Studio became the operational backbone of the platform. It was not only a lesson editor, but a connected workflow system for assignment, creation, moderation, review, approval, and publishing. Because trainers directly shaped the learner experience, the creation tools needed to feel efficient, structured, and trustworthy.

Pain point
Trainer Studio had to support much more than lesson editing. Trainers needed a workspace where they could receive assigned modules, create lessons, build different types of content, submit work for review, respond to moderator feedback, and eventually publish completed training. This meant the trainer experience had to support two very different modes at once: creative production and operational workflow management.

Intent
Design a creation system that helped trainers build training content while also keeping the full production process organized. The early flows show how broad the studio experience needed to become. Trainers needed to manage assigned modules, reorder lessons, add lessons to modules, modify existing lessons, and build content using multiple formats including video, whiteboard, images, discussion threads, text, code blocks, and quizzes. The moderator side added another layer. Moderators needed to assign modules, track progress, review submitted lessons, check content as complete, update live modules, manage playlists, and publish approved work.

What I designed
I designed Trainer Studio as a connected workflow, not a single editor. The system moved through assignment, creation, review, revision, approval, and publishing, allowing trainers to start from assigned lessons, enter the builder, preview the learner experience, add, edit, or rearrange content elements, and submit completed work for review. The same structure also supported moderators who needed visibility into lesson status, review needs, completed edits, module readiness, playlist management, and publishing actions.

Why
The trainer experience mattered because it directly shaped the learner experience. Trainers needed enough control to build rich lessons without the workflow feeling like a heavy backend system, while moderators needed enough visibility to manage content quality without slowing trainers down. As the process became clearer, the system expanded beyond lesson building to include assignment, review, approval, playlist creation, module management, and publishing.

What worked
The final Trainer Studio concept gave the platform a full production pipeline in one connected system. The lesson builder used the split-screen model, with editing controls in the left third and the learner preview on the larger right side, keeping trainers connected to what learners would eventually see. It became one of the strongest areas of the project because trainers responded positively to the creation and review flows, which gave them structure, flexibility, and clear visibility into where each lesson stood.

Outcome

The project moved through prototyping, internal review, InVision testing, and Hotjar feedback before portions of the experience were handed off to development. A limited beta version of the app was briefly released to the App Store for testing.

Feedback from learners and trainers was strongly positive, especially around the split-screen learning model, collaborative learning concepts, and trainer creation workflows. Testing also helped refine navigation, reporting structure, moderation behavior, content organization, and workflow clarity.

Although the original app remained limited and was eventually removed from the App Store, the product thinking continued beyond the beta. The concepts became the foundation for Adept, a separate company created under CBT Nuggets to build, manage, moderate, and deliver training at scale.

Today, CBT Nuggets uses Adept as the platform behind its training ecosystem for trainers, learners, and broader company training delivery.

What started as an exploration into improving technical learning workflows ultimately helped shape the direction of an entirely new platform company.

PROJECT

Comprehensive Brand Refresh

CBT NuggetsBranding & Visual Design