Hello, I am Alan Baker

I blend strong UX/UI design skills with data-driven insights, strategic thinking, and collaboration to create user-centric and visually engaging products.

I excel in crafting intuitive interfaces, maintaining design systems, and bridging design and development, ensuring each solution meets both user needs and business goals.

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Experience Overview

    • Promoted User-Centricity, advocating for the user by emphasizing empathy, understanding user needs, pain points, and goals, and integrating research insights into the product strategy.

    • Standardized UX Processes by establishing workflows with different teams based on project, defined UX tools and best practices, and design system

    • Collaborated closely with product managers, developers, marketing, and other stakeholders to ensure that the user experience is considered at every stage of product development.

    • Facilitated cross-functional workshops, design sprints, and co-creation sessions to foster alignment and ideation.

    • Championed innovation and continuous improvement by holding monthly team-led workshops, staying up to date on current design trends with weekly team meetings, and implemented the use of advanced prototyping tools for more accurate user testing sessions.

    • Created standardized workflows, outlining key phases and defining team involvement and responsibilities for different projects

    • Utilized RACI matrices for defining roles and responsibilities during early phases of work

    • Developed requirements documentation and templates for teams to improve cross-team communication

    • Integrated FigJam into collaborative sessions for documentation and tracking updates to ongoing work

    • Created a culture of best practices for documenting and communicating work, collaborating with different stakeholders to foster a consistent cross-team documentation standard

    • Developed dashboards for sharing information around project statuses, research updates, and insights into team Sprints and Sprint Goals

    • Collaborated with product teams, development, art, and other key stakeholders to define project scopes and deliverables

    • Transcribed user needs and business goals into actionable design tasks for teams

    • Worked closely with leadership in designing product roadmaps, aiding in defining milestones, timelines, and dependencies

    • Utilized project management tools (Jira, Plane.so, Monday, ClickUp, Trello) to break work into epics, stories, and tasks

    • Held sprint retrospectives to continuously improve design workflows, and ensure current practices are still working for feedback loops during design and for development during handoff

    • Identified risks and established contingency plans for mitigating setbacks in asset design and development phases of work

    • Quickly identified bottlenecks and collaborated with teams to resolve them

    • Provided guidance and mentorship to junior designers, helping them understand how the work being done aligns with organization goals

    • Informed team on how to align design work with broader business and project goals.

    • Ran bi-weekly design critiques focused on current work and emphasizing the use of a rubric and objective feedback

    • Lead by example in adopting best practices for project management, communication, and collaboration, fostering a culture of accountability and high performance within the design team.

Technical Skills Overview

    • Designed tokenized design system that aligns with the needs of the organization's goals and strategy for the product with clear scope and milestones. Coordinating with additional teams (such as marketing) to ensure consistency across the platform.

    • Performed audits on existing component libraries to identify inefficiencies in the current system and implemented improvements.

    • Developed and maintained component libraries in Figma and designed documentation to ensure ease of access and understanding of how and when UI elements were to be used.

    • Developed and maintained a high-fidelity component library in Protopie, where--unlike Figma--each component has its own logic and functions that are capable of communicating with one another.

    • Utilized Atomic UI design hierarchy and created clear documentation in Confluence spaces and other project documentation spaces (such as Docs and Wikis in ClickUp)

    • Developed wireframes to define basic layouts and user flows to help structure content placement

    • Developed simple animations for various behaviors, states, flow transitions, and UI

    • Developed relatively complex animations within Figma's limited animation and programming (for example, sorting and re-ordering, clearing inputs, mimicking organic interactions)

    • For game development, used Figma to quickly iterate and design storyboards for mini games

    • Developed branching game logic for remembering, recalling, and acting on stored information from user input

    • Developed filtering logic for badges and awards systems as well as reporting filtering utilizing functional arguments like function(argument1: TYPE, argument2: TYPE)

    • Developed prototypes with drag and drop sand boxes, multi-touch gesturing, and dynamic content updates

    • Developed prototypes speech recognition function and other device related functions (such as cameras and vibration for haptic feedback)

    • Developed user test overlay that tracks input, time on task, what task the user is on, quick access to different tasks within the prototype, and with the proper credentials, a source of truth for the specific prototype

    • Created a media player to simplify user testing processes

    • Experience in developing user interface assets, custom icons, image manipulation, and applying textures and effects to UI components

    • Experience in the creation of tutorials and onboarding guides, feature update animations and simplified walkthroughs for internal and external stakeholders

    • Experience with detailed animations and micro-animations with Protopie and After Effects

    • Vector Iconography in Figma and Illustrator

Work History

    • Pioneered the child-facing content of the product by developing new experiences for students to engage with the product.

    • Created, curated, and centralized the UX Team user research documentation and Confluence space.

    • Created and maintained documentation of design systems, development workflows, and user experience standardization across product.

    • Mentored junior designers on teams in the use of tokenized design systems, high fidelity prototyping, and design critique.

    • Setup audio recording sessions, conduct audio editing, track management, and collaborate with engineering and art teams to troubleshoot synchronization between audio and animation assets.

    • Collaborate cross-functionally with Curriculum, Product, Architecture, and Scrum Masters to ensure alignment, feature definition, and a cohesive roadmap.

    • Developed and Optimized workflows between development, product, and curriculum departments.

    • Co-Founder of the studio

    • Planned and developed prototype game and currently developing an action mascot-platformer for Switch and Steam.

    • Created and maintained documentation of non-technical features, initiatives, and sequence diagrams for game development.

    • Developed workflows and managed roadmaps for studio.

    • Curated backlog based on established milestones and goals

    • Creative director for Cloud Drift and ChivalBee games.

    • Character Designer, Technical Artist, Environmental Artist, Enemy Designer, Animator, UI/UX Designer, Researcher, Sound Engineer

    • Social Media manager and market researcher.

    • Researched and wrote scripts for YouTube channels boasting over 35 million subscribers

    • Worked on several UI/UX Design Projects ranging from e-commerce to tech spec hubs.

    • Graphic design work for independent record shop, channel DaveControl, breweries in Australia, the American Society of Cinematographers and other various clients.

    • Branding and thumbnail design consultation for various YouTube channels.

    • Graphic Design, Animation, Digital Illustration, and UI/UX instructor.

    • Taught Adobe Creative Suite and Figma. Focused on User-centered app and web design.

    • Created and curated custom curricula for students across 5 subjects

    • Creative director in charge of all branding, social media, and web design.

    • Responsible for writing legal contracts in addition to managing all legal work.

    • Managed and maintained clients with outreach programs.

    • Microsoft Specialist

    • Managed schedules, inventory, and training for Microsoft products in store.

    • Assistant operations chief on forward operating base

    • Created and maintained convoy manifests, serialized equipment, personnel, and blue force tracker communications.

    • Maintained food and water logistics for USMC sector of the base.

    • Maintained communications with third country nationals for convoy operations.