How I got here
I have a BFA in Painting and Visual Communication from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. My route from there to leading a digital optimization team involved a skincare startup, a lot of different job descriptions, and considerably more spreadsheets than I had anticipated.
I have always been interested in how things are organized. Alongside painting, I was drawn to systems: how we arrange information, make sense of a collection, and help someone find what they’re looking for. At one point, I considered pursuing a master’s in library science and working toward a career in art curation, either in a museum or in the private sector.
I was starting my career around the time of the economic crash of 2008. I was in survival mode.
A small business and a very large skincare education
I got a job at Skin1, a small skincare business at 680 Lake Shore Drive. We carried more than 500 brands of luxury spa and medical-grade skincare. I wrote copy, merchandised the website, managed social media, and tested products. I approached that last responsibility with particular enthusiasm.
In a small business, the boundaries between roles are fairly theoretical. I got a crash course in running a business and maintaining a website because there was work to do, and I had the opportunity to learn how to do it.
That experience also sparked a lasting interest in beauty and self-care. I liked learning about the products, figuring out how to explain them, and helping people make sense of an enormous amount of choice.
Joining a digital team of about twenty people
After five years at Skin1, a recruiter found me on LinkedIn and brought me to Ulta Beauty. Its digital team was still small, around twenty people, which is a little difficult to picture now.
I was thrilled. I admired the company, the small team felt familiar, and the people were wonderful.
Our leaders were deliberate about the environment they created. There was kindness, respect, and empathy, along with room to grow and try things. I could learn from people who knew more than I did and take on work I hadn’t done before. That experience has stayed with me. It is a large part of why the people I work with matter so much to me.
Finding my way into UX
I started in content and promotions, then moved into a broader business analyst role with a focus on user-generated content: reviews and questions and answers. For a couple of years, I was the person behind “Ask Ulta Beauty.”
Answering those questions led me to create the Ulta Beauty Brand Expert Program. I gave brand representatives a direct route to questions about their own products, with guidelines and training to help them answer usefully. The workaround became a PowerReviews pilot and eventually Brand Engage.
How the Brand Expert Program grew from a workaround into a platform feature →
Those questions revealed recurring gaps in our product pages. I was already doing work that would become central to my UX career: noticing where people needed help, looking for the cause, and improving the experience.
When Ulta established its UX team, I became one of its three founding members. We helped define our processes and methods while doing the work itself.
I designed interfaces, wireframes, and prototypes, including work on GlamLab, Ulta’s augmented-reality makeup try-on experience. I also conducted research to understand how people used what we put in front of them.
These were shared efforts. Product partners, designers, developers, researchers, analysts, and business stakeholders brought different knowledge to the work. So much of my own growth came from working alongside them.
Research and experimentation together
I became the UX lead for digital optimization and eventually led the Digital Optimization Team.
That work brought together things I had enjoyed across all those earlier roles: understanding people, making information useful, designing an experience, and figuring out whether a change helped. It also gave me the opportunity to work on how the team itself operated, from shaping a question to deciding what to do with the results.
I learned from peers, from testing ideas, and from discovering that a reasonable hypothesis could still be wrong. We tried things, looked closely, adjusted, and tried again. I loved each step along the way.
I didn’t have this career mapped out when I left art school. I had an interest in making things and organizing them, a willingness to learn, and the good fortune to work with people who gave me room to grow.
These days, I’m at home with my children, writing and making things of my own. I still find myself asking many of the same questions, usually about something less glamorous than an augmented-reality beauty experience.
Could this be easier? What are we asking someone to remember? Is there a better way to arrange it?
Apparently, that part of my brain is still very much on the clock.
Education and continued learning
School of the Art Institute of Chicago: Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA), Painting and Visual Communication; Smith Scholarship recipient.
DePaul University: Bachelor of Arts (BA), Applied Behavioral Sciences.
Cornell University: Professional Certificate, Product Management.
Nielsen Norman Group: Professional Certificate, Interaction Design, with Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini.
Earlier studies at DePaul University: Art History, Criticism and Conservation; Presidential Scholar and Honors Program.