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Erik Taylor

Hi, I'm Erik Taylor,

Senior Product Designer for complex, AI-enabled products

I turn ambiguous research and product problems into clear decisions, usable systems, and experiences teams can ship.

ResearchDecideDesignShip

My work spans global enterprise at IBM, financial services at Transamerica, and learning platforms at Tovuti LMS — from the early product thinking through the systems, interfaces, and implementation that follow.

Freelance right now, and open to the right full-time seat.

Most interested in teams where AI is reshaping the design work itself.

Featured Work

01Tovuti LMS · 8 weeks

JEM (Journey Experience Mapper)

Challenge

Teams were hand-synthesizing help docs, transcripts, and support tickets into journey maps — an estimated 10–15 hours per discovery cycle.

My contribution

Designed JEM — source ingestion, a guided AI scoping chat, an editable persona-by-stage canvas — defined its data model, and shipped it with Tovuti's lead engineer in an eight-week window.

Evidence

Ten fixes shipped during the first week of internal use. The 10–15 hours is an estimate of time avoided per discovery cycle, not a controlled measurement.

Product structure

Sources

Docs, transcripts, tickets

AI scoping chat

Guided intake

Persona canvas

Editable, by stage

Journey MappingZendeskSlackResearch SynthesisAI-Assisted Build
View JEM case study
02Tovuti LMS

Checkpoints Go/No-Go

Challenge

An approval-workflow feature tied to a commercially significant expansion opportunity, with several at-risk accounts depending on it, was "broken again" in support channels — and nobody could say precisely how.

My contribution

Synthesized 60+ Zendesk tickets, Slack signals, and internal case notes into four persona journey maps and a five-gate go/no-go assessment.

Evidence

Surfaced silent auto-approvals — a compliance risk no ticket had named — and delivered the gates to leadership before GA.

Discovery funnel

60+ signals

Tickets, Slack, case notes

4 persona maps

5-gate go/no-go

To leadership

DiscoveryJourney MappingZendeskRisk Assessment
Read the Checkpoints case study
03Transamerica

WFG Agent Portal

Challenge

The agent portal was unintuitive and impersonal — essential tools were hard to find and nothing adapted to the agent using it.

My contribution

Argued for user interviews and usability testing after direction was already set, then built a custom design system for WFG instead of bending into an off-the-shelf component set.

Evidence

Task-completion, engagement, and satisfaction targets were set from that research; the targets were aspirational, and no post-launch metrics were measured, so none are claimed here.

Design system decision

Off-the-shelf components

Rejected — didn't fit

vs.

Custom WFG design system

Built to fit branding + function

Design SystemsFigmaUsability TestingStakeholder Interviews
View the WFG Agent Portal case study

How I Work

Research into decisions

Qualitative and quantitative insight shapes the major calls: stakeholder interviews, usability testing, and synthesis of support tickets, transcripts, and field signals into decisions a team can act on — including feedback loops for AI-generated interfaces, where variance is higher and edge cases are less predictable.

Systems into shipped experiences

Design systems in Figma, from early wireframes to production-ready components: structure, consistency, and specs that do not require a meeting to decode. I translate between design, product, and engineering so decisions survive the handoff. Accessibility to WCAG 2.2 AA is a standing practice — I audit against it and hold my own work to the same bar.

Human judgment in AI-enabled products

AI products introduce a new class of UX problems — non-deterministic outputs, confidence variance, trust signals, and failure states that do not behave like traditional errors. I design for them directly, and I use AI in my own workflow — research synthesis, design-system documentation, prompt-to-prototype — as working practice rather than commentary.

Experience

Freelance

Senior Product Designer

Denver, CO · Remote

2026 – Present

Product design for teams shipping software — discovery through implementation.

Tovuti LMS

Senior Product Designer

Remote

2025 – 2026

Led design across admin and learner surfaces, and owned the design system.

  • Designed and shipped JEM, an AI journey-mapping tool, after teams were spending an estimated 10–15 hours per discovery cycle hand-synthesizing help docs, transcripts, and support tickets. Built source ingestion, a guided AI scoping chat, and an editable persona-by-stage canvas, defined the data model, and shipped it with the platform's lead engineer on Nuxt 3, Vue 3, Cloudflare D1, and the Claude API — ten fixes shipped during the first week of internal use.
  • Led discovery on Checkpoints, an approval-workflow feature tied to a commercially significant expansion opportunity, with several at-risk accounts depending on it: synthesized 60+ support tickets, Slack signals, and internal case notes into four persona journey maps and five go/no-go gates before GA — including silent auto-approvals, a compliance risk no ticket had named.
  • Owned the design system, built from scratch on Vuetify 3: token layer defined first, 50–100+ standardized and documented components referenced directly by engineers, and a governance rule that every custom component traces back to a real primitive — so 8–12 engineers build from one shared taxonomy instead of drifting into one-offs. Defined the Component Spec Framework, a repeatable design-to-engineering handoff standard deployed across four product surfaces. Specs held to WCAG AA.

Transamerica

Senior UX Designer

Denver, CO

2020 – 2024

Designed the World Financial Group (WFG) agent portal — the tools licensed agents work in daily.

  • Redesigned new-agent onboarding — a card-based homepage over a blank dashboard, with entitlements shaping what recruits versus licensed agents see. Targets were set from research and usability testing; no post-launch numbers were measured.
  • Joined a redesign whose direction was already set and pushed to add user interviews and usability testing anyway, then built a custom design system for WFG — branding and functional requirements did not map cleanly onto off-the-shelf patterns — while navigating four years of financial-services compliance review and mentoring 3–5 designers on accessibility and systems thinking.
  • Rebuilt global navigation around a goal-oriented architecture ("Manage My Business," "Grow My Business") rather than the org chart — grounded in card sorting, preference testing, and A/B testing with 100+ licensed agents, accepting that rarely-used tools become harder to reach.

IBM

Product Owner / UX Designer

Remote

2017 – 2020

Owned the Digital Sellers Guidebook — an adoption problem wearing a platform problem as a disguise.

  • Sellers treated the existing platform as overhead rather than help. Stakeholder interviews with sellers and managers surfaced the real constraint: high cognitive load and no time for training. Any fix that asked sellers to learn something new, somewhere new, would have failed the same way.
  • Built the guidebook on WordPress for easy integration with existing IBM tools, structured around three pillars: product pages, a role-segmented knowledge base, and a searchable video library.
  • Restructured that knowledge base around seller journeys — Clients, Contacts, Communications, Opportunity — with manager and seller paths separated, instead of mirroring how the content team was organized. Delivered training workshops internationally, including sessions in China and India.

IBM

Earlier IBM Experience

Remote

2008 – 2017

Copywriter to team lead — managed a global content team producing 2,500+ annual client profiles, improving submission-to-publication workflow efficiency by 50% through process redesign and editorial standards.

More Work

Advisor Navigation

Transamerica

Licensed agents could not get to the tools they used constantly: the global nav was cluttered with links and subcategories, and mobile was worse. I cut links and reordered what remained by frequency of use rather than by org chart. The tradeoff — burying rarely-used tools — is a bet that will not be provable until full rollout data comes in.

Information ArchitectureMobileUsability TestingFigma
Read the Advisor Navigation case study

IBM Digital Sellers Guidebook

IBM

Sellers saw the platform as overhead, not help — the real constraint was cognitive load, not awareness. Built on WordPress for easy integration with existing IBM tools, the guidebook organized product pages, a role-segmented knowledge base, and a searchable video library around what sellers and managers actually needed. Adoption evidence was directional, not a verified percentage.

WordPressStakeholder InterviewsContent DesignAdoption
View the IBM Digital Sellers Guidebook case study

WFG 365

Transamerica

Senior leaders refused to use the mobile app that replaced Pulse — the paycheck tabs and team metrics they ran their business on daily were gone. I led field research with three top-producing leaders, turning "this doesn't work" into a prioritized fix list, and those feature requests shipped in the next release. Adoption lift was never formally tracked, so no lift is claimed.

Field ResearchMobile UXChange ManagementStakeholder Interviews
Read the WFG 365 case study

An AI-Native Design Practice

Tovuti LMS

Three interlocking builds on one thesis: AI as infrastructure, not a bolted-on tool. JEM turns research into journey maps; 10 custom Claude skills cut an estimated 10–15 hours of synthesis to under 2; an analytics vision reframes reporting as decisions, not dashboards.

ClaudeAI Workflow DesignProduct StrategyResearch Synthesis
View the AI-Native Design Practice case study

Education

2020 · University of Denver

UX Design Bootcamp Certificate

University of Massachusetts Amherst

B.A., English Language & Literature

Skills

Practice

User interviewsStakeholder interviewsUsability testingCard sortingA/B testingJourney mappingCompetitive analysisResearch synthesisInformation architectureWorkshop facilitationDesign sprintsSAFe Agile

Tools

Design
FigmaFigJamSketchAdobe Creative SuiteMiroLucidsparkLucidchartDesign TokensAuto-layoutDev ModePrototyping
Design Systems
Component-Driven DesignAtomic DesignVuetify 3Bootstrap 5Material Design 3Apple HIGIBM CarbonComponent Spec Framework
AI
ClaudeClaude CodeClaude APIClaude DesignChatGPTGeminiOllamaCursorNotebookLMFigma MakeCustom Skill AuthoringPrompt EngineeringWorkflow Automation
Front-End
HTMLCSSVue 3Nuxt 3Cloudflare D1React (read)TypeScript (read)
Accessibility
WCAG 2.2 AAInclusive DesignAccessible Component Architecture
Platforms
WordPressZendeskSlackNotionObsidianVS CodeCamtasiaUbuntu Linux