Daniel D. Jones

I believe UX is at its best when it appears effortless. Simple, comprehensible, navigable, and friendly. To get there you need to empathize with your core audience. Who is using your product? Where are they using it? What goals are they expecting to accomplish?

As a UX Designer I love to operate at the intersection of product strategy and product design.

I like working with teams to discover that sweet spot where an organization’s resources meet the users’ needs.

I believe strongly in Research. I love spending time with the folks who will be using the tools I create, and learning their language and mental models.

I believe in sharing Insights from research with my team to quantify and articulate the most compelling problems.

I believe in Ideating. I love sticky notes and brainstorming games, card sorts, and rapid and messy sketching to get as many directions to the solution as possible.

I believe in Prototyping to breathe life into a product. I prototype using tools like Figma, Miro, Sketch, Adobe Creative Suite, and InVision. I prototype using mood boards, color palettes, font libraries, icons, and animated gestures. And I’m not afraid to get my hands dirty with some CSS and HTML when the task calls for it.

I believe in repeated Testing and Iterating to continuously improve how we serve our key users.

In 2021 I joined Garmin as a UX Designer with their Outdoor Team, where I have helped design wrist-mounted computers for scuba divers, ranging scopes for hunters and backpackers, and smartwatch features for trail runners.

I earned an MFA at American University, and ran point on multimedia and communications for Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society from 2008-2019. After 11 years at Harvard, I switched careers to pursue UX Design through a remote course with Springboard, where I completed a capstone project to optimize how runners experience coaching in an app and smartwatch environment.

In 2020 I joined backstitch – a Kansas City, MO based B2B employee engagement platform – as their first full time UI/UX designer. There, I built out a design system for their suite of employee engagement tools, developed and led their feature scoping process, and brought the power of rapid prototyping to build out new features for testing with users, saving us dozens of hours of developer time.

Born and now based in Lawrence, Kansas, my work has allowed me to travel and live around the world, from reporting on the environment in South Africa, to creating instructional multimedia for project managers in Washington, DC, to redesigning websites for researchers at Harvard University.

In 2022 I became the co-chair of the UX Professionals Association of Kansas City. I am an avid board gamer, a trail runner, an aspiring Spanish speaker, and the proud parent of two cats and one temperamental sourdough starter.