Erik Taylor
Senior Product Designer · AI × UX
The decisions that matter get made upstream of the build — before anything gets generated.
How I designed JEM
An AI journey-mapping tool, from pain point to production in eight weeks.
Erik Taylor has been working on software since 2008, when he joined IBM as a copywriter. Over the twelve years that followed he moved from copywriting to team lead to product owner and UX designer, ending with ownership of the Digital Sellers Guidebook — an adoption problem wearing a platform problem as a disguise. Stakeholder interviews surfaced the real constraint: sellers had high cognitive load and no time for training, so any fix that asked them to learn something new, somewhere new, would have failed the same way. He built the guidebook on WordPress for easy integration with existing IBM tools, organizing it around product pages, a role-segmented knowledge base, and a searchable video library.
At Transamerica he designed the World Financial Group agent portal, the tools licensed agents work in daily. He joined a redesign whose direction was already set and argued for user interviews and usability testing anyway, built a design system tailored to WFG rather than bending its requirements onto an off-the-shelf component set, and rebuilt global navigation around frequency of use instead of the org chart. The onboarding redesign that followed set research-backed targets for task completion, engagement, and satisfaction; no post-launch adoption numbers were measured. At Tovuti LMS he owned the design system — token layer first, every component traced back to a real primitive, specs consumed by eight to twelve engineers — led the go/no-go discovery on a $500K+ ARR approval-workflow feature, and designed JEM, an AI journey-mapping tool shipped with the platform's lead engineer that gives teams back 10–15 hours per discovery cycle.
He is freelance as of 2026, based in Denver and working remotely, focused on where AI is changing what design owns. He audits organizations against WCAG 2.2 AA and holds his own work to the same bar. This site is part of the record rather than a description of it: the assistant behind the "Ask about my work" button is a retrieval-augmented build on Claude, with automated evaluations and tracing behind it.
Open to full-time roles in:
Timeline
Senior Product Designer
Freelance — Product design for teams shipping software, discovery through implementation.
Senior Product Designer
Tovuti LMS — Led design across admin and learner surfaces; owned the design system.
UX Designer
Transamerica — The World Financial Group agent portal and its design system.
Product Owner / UX Designer
IBM — Owned the Digital Sellers Guidebook.
Team Lead
IBM — Team lead prior to moving into product ownership and design.
Copywriter
IBM — Where the tenure count starts — writing before designing.
Projects
JEM (Journey Experience Mapper)
Tovuti LMS · An AI tool that turns raw research sources into editable, persona-based journey maps.
Checkpoints Go/No-Go
Tovuti LMS · Discovery synthesis and a five-gate risk assessment on a $500K+ ARR approval workflow.
WFG Agent Portal
Transamerica · A design system and portal experience built for licensed financial agents.
Advisor Navigation
Transamerica · Global navigation reordered by frequency of use rather than the org chart.
IBM Digital Sellers Guidebook
IBM · An adoption problem solved on tooling sellers already used, rather than new infrastructure.
WFG 365
Transamerica · Field research that recovered a mobile app launch senior leaders had refused to use.
An AI-Native Design Practice
Tovuti LMS · JEM, 10 custom Claude skills, and an analytics vision — AI as infrastructure, not a bolted-on tool.
FAQ
Who is Erik Taylor?
Erik Taylor is a senior product designer based in Denver, Colorado, working remotely, with more than eighteen years of experience. He started at IBM in 2008 as a copywriter and moved through team lead into product ownership and UX design, then spent four years at Transamerica designing the World Financial Group agent portal for licensed financial agents, and a year at Tovuti LMS on admin and learner experiences for its learning platform. He works upstream — research, information architecture, and design systems, where the decisions get made — rather than downstream on visual polish. He is currently freelance and open to full-time roles.
What has Erik built?
At IBM he owned the Digital Sellers Guidebook: built on WordPress with role-segmented content — product pages, knowledge base, and a searchable video library — informed by stakeholder interviews with sellers and managers. At Transamerica he built a design system for the World Financial Group agent portal, redesigned new-agent onboarding with research-backed targets for task completion, engagement, and satisfaction (no post-launch metrics were measured), and rebuilt global navigation around frequency of use rather than the org chart. At Tovuti LMS he owned the design system, led go/no-go discovery on a $500K+ ARR approval-workflow feature, and designed JEM, an AI journey-mapping tool shipped with the platform's lead engineer that saves teams 10–15 hours per discovery cycle. He also built this site, including the retrieval-augmented assistant that answers questions about his work.