Summary

Extremely passionate Design Systems Lead with extensive Product (UX/UI) Design and UX Engineering (Front-end Development) professional with more than 20+ years of experience in agency, corporate and remote settings. Focused on solving valuable customer-driven problems by way of user-centered design principles and visually delightful / functional experiences via Design Systems.

• Expertise in visual and interaction design, wireframing, prototyping, information architecture, design strategy, front-end development, design systems, and design production.
• Passion for implementing and educating teams on creating and using a consistent user experience, visual language, and code base by way of a Design System (living style guide, pattern library, UI kit, brand guidelines, etc.) using systematic and modular methodologies.
• Enthusiastic collaborator in the product design and development process, with extensive experience in designer-developer pairing, rapid iteration, and Lean UX & Agile methodologies.
• Efficient contributor in a variety of settings, from leading projects, to working autonomously, to collaborating with teams large and small.
• Effective communicator, team player, mentor and product/project champion.
• Avid observer of digital culture and technology.

Skills

Applications & Tools

Sketch, Abstract, Figma, Pen & Paper, Whiteboarding, Zeplin, Flinto, Principle, Invision, Whimsical, Adobe Creative Suite, Fractal, Pattern Lab, Style Dictionary, VS Code, Git Version Control, GitHub, BitBucket, JIRA, Confluence, Notion, and Coda.

Experience

Design System Lead, Principal UX/UI Designer & Principal Front-end Developer

Citizens | April 2019 to Current | Johnston, RI + Remote

• Leading the visual, engineering, and architectural direction of the experience design, visual style, front-end development, and technical tooling of the multi-platform, and multi-product Citizens Design System.
• Leading the product management of the Citizens Design System within an Agile/Lean/Scrum environment, including; managing an opportunity backlog, product backlog, and roadmap, facilitating team sprint planning and stand-ups, identifying, prioritizing, and monitoring user/job stories of ongoing design, development, and documentation across the team
• Leading the visual and technical direction of the experience design, visual style, and technical tooling, with input from director-level peers of product design and development teams.
• Report team and system progress regularly to primary director leads and executive/VP-level sponsors.
• Direct scope of systems concerns and relevant products to adopt it.
• Present the system’s mission, library, and process to other groups, including product managers, content specialists, QA, and other design and development teams throughout the enterprise.
• Identify and nurture team growth and culture, identifying opportunities for team members to drive and lead system aspects.
• Decisively resolve priorities, timing, risks, task importance, and possible breaking changes.
• Clarify scope to balance delivering minimum useful functionality with properly scalable system design.
• Identify, monitor, and report on system use across the enterprise.
• Attend and coordinate with product management release planning activities to identify library needs.
• Interview and foster discussions with others using the system.
• Align research activity to assess efficacy of system concerns.
• Challenge the system team on what to automate vs manually perform.
• Deliver system releases at a predictable cadence.
• Manage the backlog and roadmap of library features.
• Facilitate regular team scrum and sprint planning sessions.
• Identify, prioritize, and monitor task progress of design, development, and documentation across team members.
• Schedule regular meetings for critique, scrum, planning, and reviews.
• Negotiate and clarify staff capacity for system work relative to other commitments to deliver releases at a predictable velocity.

Senior UX/UI Designer & Design Systems Lead

CVS Health | April 2015 to March 2019 | Woonsocket, RI + Remote

• Evangelized, owned, led UX/UI and front-end development of the pilot CVS Retail Design System. The CVS Retail Design System contained a robust UI Kit along with a hand-made HTML & CSS component library built exclusively to power the 2nd CVS.com Shop re-platform application. Led all development, design, and delivery efforts on the 2nd phase of CVS Retail Design System by partnering with external vendor to adopt and build a Riot.js powered version to use within the CVS.com Shop. This effort led the way to prove the value of a Design System within the enterprise, which in-turn green-lit funding for an official CVS Design System team and product.
• Evangelized, piloted and drove efforts to fund the first CVS enterprise-level Design System (style guide, pattern library, UI kit, documentation system, prototyping environment). This initiative will cut down on engineering efforts and unify brand & UI elements across devices, platforms, and teams.
• Owned, led UX/UI, and provided front-end development expertise across 2 completely different re-platforms of the CVS.com Shop end-to-end e-commerce experience consisting of the PLP, PDP, Department & Category level pages, and Search results. Led front-end development architecture and component library build in collaboration with Group By platform, based in Toronto, by traveling to Canada for over 30+ days of collaboration spanning 1-1.5 years.
• Owned, led UX/UI, and provided front-end development expertise on a wide variety of highly visible and impactful websites and applications based projects, including: Curbside platform (http://shopcurbside.com), Remote Payments platform, Digital Receipts, and "theSource" knowledge base solution to name a few. Designed and built mini UI Kit's for each independent platform for efficiency and design consistency.
• Producing robust set of deliverables for all products and applications including: wireframes (low, mid and hi-fi), static and/or interactive prototypes, responsive pixel-perfect mockups for mobile app, mobile web, tablet and desktop sizes (including all micro-interactions, states, scenarios, and all variations as re-usable components), highly detailed style guides, developer specifications and assets.
• Work directly with stakeholders, producers, copywriters and various teams (Development, Prototyping, QA, UAT, Innovation Lab, Mobile App) to execute against objectives presented in business & functional requirements documents; participate in project calls to present work for review; discuss feedback and accept critique to build products that satisfy both business and user goals.
• Implemented and drove efforts to integrate more modern tools and UX processes such as using Invision to streamline creative reviews, feedback and project management, Zeplin for design to developer specifications handoff, Sketch App for wireframing and mockups, Flinto & Principle for interactive prototyping, and Trello and/or Jira for a more modern way to track defects and communicate with the IT development, QA and UAT teams.
• Implemented and drove improvements to communication efforts and cross-collaboration between teams (UX, IT, Prototyping, Product Management, Marketing, QA & UAT) to improve overall design processes, speed to market and reduce UX documentation for a more Lean & Agile process.

Creative Director, Principal UX/UI Designer & Principal Front-end Developer

PICnet | March 2007 to April 2015 | Washington DC (100% Remote)

• Designed and developed responsive front-end, web-based, custom Joomla! SAAS CMS platform “Soapbox”, that powers all client based websites. Platform consisted of reusable front-end modules & components (pattern library) that gave the client the power to build their website on their own. This allowed for template & pattern reuse across all client websites, resulting in fewer bugs and support requests, consistent experiences, easier testing, and maintainability. The platform allowed for 40hr UX/UI design and front-end development stage increasing per-project profits by 50% and faster project completion cycles.
• Designed and developed the “Soapbox Engage” platform. Platform consisted of 7 add-on web applications for the Soapbox platform which all integrated with Salesforce CRM. Apps included: Donations (payment processing), Events (event management), Forms (form builder), Directories (data display), Shop (simple e-commerce), Petitions (online advocacy with signatures), Actions (send messages to government decision makers).
• Owned, designed, developed and maintained responsive websites based on Soapbox and Soapbox Engage platforms for 100+ non-profit clients.
• Owned web/UI design, user experience design & strategy, usability, user-centric design principles, front-end web development, back-end integration, flash design & programming across all projects.

Senior UX/UI Designer, Senior Front-end Developer & Back-end Developer

Advanced Financial Services | January 2003 to February 2007 | Newport, RI

• Owned, designed and developed consumer facing financial portal which provided users with services such as extensive loan management, knowledge base (tutorials, articles, testimonials and faqs), multiple mortgage calculators and printable DHL return labels. Created a custom CMS and front-end framework for the web based portal using modular HTML/CSS/JS components and MVC back-end technologies.
• Owned, designed and developed the CallTracker Flash application. This allowed team leads to track & record calls between clients and loan officers. The system consisted on getting CISCO phones, enterprise networked PCs & storage, Flash web applications and Asp.net services talking and working together. Team leaders could initiate recording to any of their 8 loan officers via a small Flash UI located on their computers. The recorded audio could then be listed too, filtered and organized via a separate Flash interface (similar to iTunes).
• Owned, designed and developed an internal web & Flash based classifieds ads system and employee directory.
• Owned web/UI design, user experience design & strategy, usability, user-centric design principles, front-end web development, back-end integration, flash design & programming across all projects.
• Learned (on the job) and implemented back-end development technologies across projects including Asp.Net, Web Services, Flash Remoting, SQL databases & design, XML and API’s.

Interactive Designer & Front-end Developer

Gearbox Interactive | August 2000 to July 2002 | Dulles, VA

• Led the design & development of the Gearbox DATASITE system. A SAAS based website builder platform that consisted of a starter web/UI design kit, pattern library and CMS based interface that increased sales cycles, time to market, kept projects on the budget along with process improvements across the design & development teams.
• Owned web/UI design, user experience design & strategy, usability and user-centric design principles across all projects.
• Owned front-end web development, back-end integration, flash design & programming across all projects.
• Developed project scoping, functional requirements, budgets, and web strategies for clients.
• Designed and developed static, dynamic and flash based websites, animations, and CD-ROMs.

Interactive Designer & Front-end Developer

Altair Technologies | November 1998 to July 2000 | VA Beach, VA

• Owned web/UI design, user experience design & strategy, usability and user-centric design principles across all projects.
• Owned front-end web development, back-end integration, flash design & programming across all projects.
• Designed and developed 3D animation sequences, motion graphics, special effects, storyboards and video for online and CD-ROM projects.
• Designed, developed and maintained client websites.
• Designed and developed military training CD-ROMs using Macromedia Flash for interactive learning.
• Designed and produced printable documents for CDs, promotional materials, and flyers.
• Created and produced beats, audio loops, vocal materials and music for all web and interactive projects.

LinkedIn Recommendations

“Ryan is a talented UX & UI designer. He creates robust prototypes, detailed wireframes and visual designs across all digital channels (cvs.com, email, mobile). A great colleague, he is open to feedback and pragmatically delivers the best user experience possible. His attention to detail is impeccable, I’ve never met anyone who creates specs like he does. Ryan is the “unicorn” that everyone wants on their team.” Hugo Faustino - UX Strategy & Design Consultant

“In my work experience of 10 years across non-profit, corporate, and startup sectors, Ryan Belisle is the most consistent, thorough, and reliable teammate I've ever worked with. His talent and creativity as a designer are evident is his versatile portfolio that can help organizations realize innovative designs that match its mission and culture. Most importantly, Ryan is easy to work with. He'll push back with ideas, give direct answers, and meets his commitments every time - I have no idea how he does it. I highly recommend Ryan for any position in UX/web design and development.” Pradeep Suthram - Helping social enterprises scale globally at RippleWorks.org

“Ryan is an ideal coworker. He is an incredibly talented designer and front-end developer. He also very mindful about his design and UX choices and really tries to tie back all of his design decisions to web best practices and our client's organizational goals. He is also extremely disciplined in his work and always meets deadlines. He is responsive, hard working, and an incredible asset to have on the team.” Amber Manning - Director of Development Operations at Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation

Education

• Never Ending Independent Study → Continuing education with reading and online courses.
• Certificate in Multimedia Design (1998) → School of Communication Arts - Raleigh, NC.
• Certificate in Computer Art & Animation (1997) → School of Communication Arts - Raleigh, NC.