Rhia Bucklin

At UpTop I lead a team of user experience designers and developers who craft compelling and effective digital solutions for our agency customers and internal projects. My work encompasses all phases of product development, from the concept and strategy, through stakeholder buy-in, research, wireframes, design, development, launch and beyond.

• Partner with client stakeholders to uncover, define, and address unmet user and business needs
• Research and report on customer journeys to uncover friction points
• Lead design thinking and product development workshops
• Research, competitive analysis and reviews of industry best practices
• Communicate design strategies and reasoning to leadership
• Create wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity comps to communicate design ideas and illustrate user interaction
• Help clients understand impact vs effort to prioritize work in Agile development sprints
• Collaborate with development leads to create buildable solutions within technological and budgetary constraints
• Facilitate user interviews and remote user testing
• UX writing for on the best words to accelerate successful interaction
• Design production-ready deliverables
• Use browser developer tools to fine-tune user interface elements
• QA of development work to assure visual and functional quality
• Create data-driven design artifacts (user journeys, personas, storyboards)

Transitioned from a developer to designer by learning how to evaluate business goals, empathize with user needs and ideate solutions to create buildable designs that can be tested, evaluated and refined.

• Prototyping and design for website and app interfaces
• Stakeholder and customer interviews
• Low, mid and high-fidelity wireframes
• Content audits, taxonomy and information architecture
• Visual and marketing design
• Development and maintenance of style guides and design resources
• Grid-based design for responsive, adaptive and native products
• Native iOS app design
• Accessibility best practices
• Google Analytics
• A/B test design and execution
• Participate and lead brainstorming sessions

Development and design of effective user interfaces with a focus on responsive web design, standards compliance, best practices and clean code.

• Front End Development Team Lead: May 2015 - March 2016
• Applied visual design to functional applications built in PHP, Ruby on Rails, ColdFusion, etc.
• Custom WordPress development
• Rapid prototyping with HTML, CSS and JavaScript
• Wrote technical specifications, application documentation and user training guides
• Created videos for training and onboarding
• Evaluated website and app performance using Google Analytics
• Search engine optimization
• Created and advocated for team adoption of CSS and HTML best practices

User Experience lead on a startup team working to design, build and launch a new streaming music product with an innovative social component.

• Collaborated with founder to create user personas, define product goals, develop an information architecture and taxonomy, and design an effective user experience.
• Produced wireframes to test ideas and help direct visual design and backend development.
• Collaborated with other team members to help the company founder refine the business proposal for investor and venture capital presentations.

Developed websites for a broad range of enterprise, small business and non-profit clients in a fast-paced agency environment.

• Maintained coding standards and expectations for the web build team
• Applied HTML and CSS to applications coded in Ruby, ColdFusion, Java/JSP and PHP with an emphasis on cross-browser compatibility
• Turned Photoshop or Illustrator designs into functional web pages
• Wrote copy for proposals, websites and user guides
• Created graphics and optimized them for the web
• Added and modified Javascript code to pages for increased functionality
• Converted video to web formats for playback via Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Website coding and page design for the largest telecom in the Pacific Northwest, and their small business and enterprise clients.

• Site maintenance and new page creation
• Graphics production and optimization
• Technical coding support for customers
• Managed legal postings and FCC-mandated announcements

Focus areas included computer science and writing creative nonfiction. Designed and completed in an independent study program studying the intersection between usability, human-computer interaction and effective web design.

Check out my portfolio site to learn more about my project work and experience.