Hi. I'm Chris.
I bring humanity
to complex products and problems,
turning big ideas into focused, scalable, and buildable experiences that don't just move the needle—they break it.
★ 20+ years designing complex digital products
★ Public, private, enterprise — B2B, B2E, B2C
★ UX, interaction, systems, AI, and front-end delivery
Talk through a problemBreaking the Cycle and Shipping the Product
A long-stalled, high-visibility product was trapped in endless redesign loops. I stepped in, aligned design with engineering and the designs system, restored cross-team trust, and shipped a real mobile experience that finally validated the core vision.
Pivoting to Save a Doomed UX
A critical product experience was heading toward failure—overbuilt, misaligned, and losing stakeholder confidence. I intervened to reframe the problem, cut through complexity, realign the team, and pivot the UX toward a clear, buildable path before the window closed.
Patterns I’ve solved before
I design and lead ambitious products forward—creating original visions when needed, and bringing clarity, alignment, and momentum when complexity threatens progress.
Ambitious products stuck between exploration and delivery
Visionary designs that need a clear path to being built
Teams struggling to align around a shared user goal
Engineering losing confidence due to unclear UX direction
Design systems creating friction instead of enabling momentum
Discoverability issues misread as usability problems
Over-designed UI compensating for unresolved strategy
Invisible friction undermining otherwise strong experiences
Innovation and AI capabilities searching for the right UX model
Knowing when to push the vision—and when to ship
Across enterprise platforms, mobile-first systems, regulated environments, and AI-assisted experiences, these patterns are where strong ideas either stall—or take shape.
Representative Artifacts
Strengths
Design Philosophy
Design is shared business strategy, not surface polish.
I focus on helping real people accomplish real goals with clarity and confidence.
Strong outcomes come from creativity, data, and craft working together.
Clarity first. Simplicity always.
Human-first design with AI-fluent execution.
Vision grounded in shipped reality.
Enterprise & Product UX
Designing and simplifying complex, multi-step workflows.
Building and evolving design systems that scale across platforms.
Making sense of data-rich interfaces without overwhelming users.
Designing mobile experiences that respect real-world constraints.
Structuring information architecture and navigation for comprehension.
AI & Narrative UX
Shaping natural-language workflows people can understand and trust.
Designing AI orchestration patterns with clear boundaries and oversight.
Making system behavior visible through trust and transparency models.
Keeping humans in the loop when decisions matter.
Using narrative structure to support comprehension and decision-making in ambiguous systems.
Collaboration & Leadership
Working effectively across distributed, cross-functional teams.
Facilitating remote collaboration without slowing momentum.
Aligning stakeholders around shared understanding and clear direction.
Using narrative framing to resolve ambiguity and move teams forward.
Chris delivered a beautifully designed, responsive experience that worked flawlessly across devices.
— Nick DiSabatino, Chief of Technology, Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts
Collaborating with Chris was one of the most productive experiences of my career.
Chris delivers relentlessly under near-infinite feedback cycles. He brings clarity, insight, and an invaluable outside perspective.
Chris became the backbone of Touchless Expenses execution almost overnight. We would be far behind without him.
Chris makes every team better with his rare mix of big-picture thinking and strong execution.
Chris elevated our product with deep UX expertise, clarity of vision, and true user-first leadership.
Chris transformed a dry expense process into an intuitive, elevated experience across mobile and desktop.
Chris is an agile, hands-on change agent who challenges the status quo in the best way.
— Jonathan Distler, Manager, eGovernment Services, Arlington County Government
Chris brings a rare mix of UX mastery, creative strategy, and technical execution—and he delivers.
Chris is a visionary designer who always puts the customer first. He deeply understands how people actually use systems and designs accordingly.
— Paul H. Parry, Manager, Data & Application Architecture, Arlington County Government
Chris brings powerful strategic thinking to every design problem. His understanding of people, technology, and experience design is exceptional.
Chris is reliable, approachable, and relentlessly user-focused. He steps up under pressure, meets impossible timelines, and always delivers thoughtful, well-researched design.
Chris is a true powerhouse—innovative, deeply knowledgeable, and endlessly enthusiastic. He pushes design forward while staying grounded in real constraints.
Chris blends enterprise-level technical skill with genuine care for the user. He’s attentive, thoughtful, and always focused on making the right decision for the customer.
Chris designs with clarity, warmth, and deep empathy for users. Even with shifting priorities, he remains calm, focused, and solutions-oriented.
Experience
Oracle
2016 – 2025
Remote
Senior Principal UX Designer
Established shared UX and platform patterns across fragmented internal systems (Advanced Services Portal), improving signal clarity and aligning multiple engineering teams around buildable standards.
Redesigned My Oracle Support end-to-end, reducing friction, expanding self-service, and introducing narrative issue-intake flows that improved comprehension and laid the foundation for natural-language and AI-driven support experiences.
Unblocked a multi-year design stalemate on Mobile-First Expenses by aligning product vision with platform capabilities, enabling the first Redwood mobile launch and scaling adoption from a 25-user pilot to thousands.
Defined the AI/NLP ERP & EPM onboarding North Star, shaping agentic workflows, trust and oversight behaviors, and narrative structure required for users to understand, evaluate, and rely on AI-driven implementation.
Designed DCAC (Data Collection & Analysis Center), a unified diagnostic platform replacing multiple siloed tools and improving accuracy, workflow consistency, and time-to-resolution for global support teams.
CSRA
2012 – 2016
Arlington, VA
Senior UX Designer
Designed a unified national training platform for federal probation officers, improving onboarding consistency and comprehension across all court districts.
Arlington County Government
2006 – 2012
Arlington, VA
Enterprise Information Architect
Modernized resident and employee digital services through improved IA, navigation structure, and information clarity.
Career Foundations
1998 – 2006
Washington, DC Metro Area
Early career roles spanning UX design, information architecture, and browser-based interaction design across agency and consulting environments, establishing a durable foundation in web standards, usability, and system-level thinking.
Hi, again.
I began my design career in the early days of the web, helping federal agencies and small businesses figure out how this whole “internet” thing could actually make people’s lives easier. The tools, technologies, and job titles have changed a hundred times since then, but the purpose hasn’t: use design to bring clarity, momentum, and humanity to complicated systems.
Over the last 20+ years I’ve designed products across government, enterprise, and consumer spaces—leading UX for complex platforms, building AI-driven experiences, and shipping the kind of work that only comes from staying close to both the craft and the code. I came up through the browser wars, mobile’s first wave, design systems, and now agentic AI, and I still believe in designing with my sleeves rolled up.
My path to UX wasn’t linear. Before I ever opened Photoshop 1.0, I worked everywhere from restaurants and factories to Congress and financial firms. I busked in NYC subways, danced flamenco, trained in Taekwondo, conversed in German, Turkish, and Arabic, and served in the Navy’s Nuclear Power program. I’ve even co-authored vampire books and written political reports for Middle East operatives. All of it feeds my curiosity and my ability to create experiences for people who live very different lives.
I studied Philosophy at the University of Connecticut (Phi Beta Kappa), with earlier training at the Connecticut School of Broadcasting, NYU, and the University of Mannheim. Today I’m back in Connecticut with my family—not far from where I was born—after living in California, DC, Florida, Hawaii, New York, South Carolina, Utah, and Virginia.
The short version: I design to make hard things feel doable, complex things feel clear, and ambitious ideas feel real. And human. I also maintain a few ongoing creative projects that keep me grounded in making, not just shipping.
