Renae Wood

Renae Wood is a UX designer working to help companies and peers adopt a user-centered approach.

About Me

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I am a senior UX designer with 20+ years of experience in graphic design, user experience design, and user interface design.

I love bringing the user’s voice to the table and using UX methodologies to align team members and business goals with the wants and needs of the users. I'm passionate about team collaboration; working well with product owners and engineers allows us to create the best solutions.

If you’re interested in talking shop, I’m always happy to meet up for coffee; in-person or virtually. Reach out on LinkedIn or renaewood.ux@gmail.com.

Skill Sets

 PRIMARY ROLES

    • Designs intuitive, user-centric experiences that enhances trust, delights users, and improves workflow efficiency.

    • Leads end-to-end projects from conception to execution within Agile environments.

    • Applies user-centered design principles to improve functionality, workflows, and visual appeal.

    • Conducts user research, creates personas, defines information architecture, and designs streamlined interfaces.

    • Effectively communicates design decisions, trade-offs, and rationale to stakeholders.

    • Balances speed and quality to drive impact through both optimizations and new product development.

    • Advocates for users by leveraging feedback, data analytics, and research to inform design decisions.

    • Conducts qualitative and quantitative user research through interviews, usability testing, and surveys to uncover key customer insights and drive continuous improvement.

    • Documents and synthesizes user research findings to inform design decisions, product development, and strategic prioritization.  

    • Advocates for the voice of the user in cross-functional conversations, ensuring user needs and pain points shape product and design solutions.  

    • Collaborates with product, design, and development teams to build empathy for users, fostering user-centered thinking throughout the product lifecycle.  

    • Utilizes research insights to identify opportunities for innovation, workflow improvements, and enhance overall user experiences.

 

LEADERSHIP APPROACH & SKILLS

    • Creates a user-centric design culture by leading UX strategy and execution, inspiring teams with clear strategic objectives, visionary leadership, and defining both long-term visions and short-term milestones to unlock customer value. 

    • Collaborates cross-functionally to understand customer problems, build empathy, and inform product prioritization.  

    • Drives end-to-end design leadership, balancing speed and quality in both optimizations and 0-1 product development.  

    • Influences product direction through compelling storytelling, persuasive presentations, and design rationale to stakeholders at all levels, including senior leadership.    

    • Advocates for user needs using research, feedback, and data analytics to uncover insights and improve experiences.  

    • Defines scalable design standards and principles to ensure efficiency, consistency, and usability across products.

    • Facilitates brainstorming sessions and workshops to cultivate innovation, creative problem-solving, and alignment.

    • Mentors and coaches designers, fostering professional growth, user-centric mindsets, and a culture of continuous learning and improvement.  

    • Creates a collaborative team environment that empowers designers to do their best work and develop strong points of view.  

    • Drives operational excellence by implementing effective workflows, design processes, and resource management strategies to enhance team efficiency across complex product ecosystems.  

    • Shapes and grows the design team culture through mentorship and contributing to team-building activities that strengthen shared values and improve overall team dynamics.  

 

SUPPORTING SKILL SETS

    • Advocates for and contributes to scalable design systems, ensuring consistent, high-quality user experiences across products.

    • Collaborates with cross-functional teams to identify common customer and business needs, crafting design patterns that address both effectively.  

    • Applies systems thinking to solve complex design challenges, promoting a platform-first approach for consistent, scalable, and efficient solutions.  

    • Maintains and evolves the design system documentation to ensure accessibility, clarity, and up-to-date guidelines for designers, developers, and product owners.  

    • Partners with development teams to ensure components are engineered in alignment with design and interaction specifications for seamless implementation.

    • Collaborates closely with developers to ensure design implementation aligns with intended user experiences and interaction specifications.

    • Works iteratively within Agile frameworks, fostering rapid feedback loops to refine designs based on technical feasibility while meeting the business and user needs. 

    • Communicates the rationale behind design decisions, including trade-offs and lessons learned, to empower the development team for future decision making.

    • Facilitates constructive debates with engineering to assess design feasibility, propose thoughtful alternatives, and align on technical constraints.

    • Supports engineering teams by providing detailed design and interaction specs, ensuring high-quality component development.

    • Quickly prototypes and visualizes ideas to communicate concepts effectively across disciplines.

    • Builds strong relationships and fosters trust across cross-functional teams, enhancing collaboration to drive user-centered design solutions.  

    • Facilitates whiteboarding sessions and problem-solving workshops to align stakeholders, encouraging diverse perspectives, and generating innovative ideas.  

    • Partners with cross-functional teams to identify customer problems, uncover key opportunities, and define both long-term UX visions and short-term milestones.  

    • Leads stakeholder interviews to gather insights, inform design strategies, and ensure solutions meet both user needs and business objectives.  

    • Communicates design decisions effectively, articulating rationale and strategic thinking to stakeholders at all levels to gain alignment and buy-in.  

    • Champions user-centered thinking within multi-disciplinary teams, by sharing customer insights and building empathy, ensuring user voices are represented throughout the product development lifecycle.  

    • Facilitates and actively participates in refinement meetings with with product and  engineering teams, fostering cross-functional alignment, shared problem-solving, and rapid iteration on solutions.  

    • Translates complex requirements into clear design artifacts, user flows, and prototypes that support agile development cycles and inform product decisions.

    • Aligns design decisions with technical feasibility and business goals through open dialogue with engineers, identifying thoughtful trade-offs and alternative solutions.  

    • Leverages agile methodologies to adapt quickly to change, delivering incremental value while refining solutions based on user insights and team feedback.  

    • Drives stronger future solutions by promoting cross-functional empathy, encouraging diverse perspectives, and learning from each iteration.  

    • Drives incremental product improvements by balancing long-term vision with strategic scoping and sequencing to deliver continuous user value.  

    • Collaborates with Product and Engineering teams to identify opportunities for addressing technical and design debt while aligning with future technology goals.  

    • Applies a strong understanding of web patterns and design foundations to discern when to innovate verse when to leverage existing standards for efficiency and consistency.  

    • Partners with development teams to ensure components are engineered in alignment with design specifications, promoting consistency and reducing rework.  

    • Advocates for user-centered design by creating simple, elegant, and intuitive experiences that enhance workflows while systematically reducing design debt.

    • Fosters cross-functional collaboration to align technical feasibility with design excellence, supporting incremental improvements that lead to long-term product evolution.  

Experience

Most Recent

UI/UX Design Manager – Treasury4
Mar 2022 - Present

Product Designer – JUNO
Jun 2021 - Mar 2022

UX Designer – RiskLens
Feb 2020 - Jun 2021

Senior UX Designer – Aon
Jun 2019 - Feb 2020

Kudos to Renae for always having patience with our team and doing an amazing job of leading journey mapping sessions that help uncover potential user issues from the start rather than down the road after half (or more) of the work is done! Her mockups and UI/UX suggestions are way better than anything I ever have or could produce!
— Co-worker, Next IT

Work Examples

 

Modernize Insurance Portal and Align with Agents’ Workflows

The goal for this project was to deliver an updated online agent experience that improved insurance agents’ daily use of the platform and streamlined their most common workflows.

 

Create Medication Tracking Mobile App with AI Chat

This digital health coach app was created for Parkinson's disease (PD) patients and caregivers to help them keep track of their patch medication records, get quick easy access to information on PD and keep track of their overall health.

 
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Improve Information Architecture and UI of a Conversational Data Analysis Tool

With a limited amount of time to dedicate to the project, the goal was to make UI improvements that would improve the visual experience and not be time consuming to implement.

 

User Persona Workshop

This presentation and workshop was created for a Spokane UX Meetup session where I presented information about user personas and why they are important. We split into groups and I walked participants through an example workshop on how to create user personas.

 

Visual Design

A collection of print and logo design work.