Before Customer.io

Seven years of agency design work across insurance, hospitality, and manufacturing

Before Customer.io, 7 years of agency and product design work, high level overviews included here to show the range.

Pac Global Claims Tool

Design Lead, Interaction Designer · Planet Argon · August 2017

Pac Global insures items being shipped internationally. When something arrived damaged, resolving a claim meant everyone, claimants, shippers, and Pac Global’s team, working through a single form and then waiting on email back and forth. Claimants could claim items that weren’t covered, or amounts they’d never insured, and once a claim went in there was no visibility into what happened next. It was inefficient and costly for everyone involved.

I mapped the workflow across claimants, shippers, and the Pac Global team, then designed every step from account creation to payment confirmation around a few clear goals: transparency in the process, a self-guided tool that prevented user error instead of catching it after the fact, and accountability for all parties. I worked from sketches through wireframes, then partnered with a visual designer to keep the interface informational and guiding rather than overwhelming, since insurance terminology and financial details are already confusing enough on their own.

McMenamins Private Events

Design Lead, Interaction Designer · Planet Argon · December 2014

McMenamins has more than 50 properties across the Pacific Northwest, from small restaurants to full resorts, with over 10 available to book for weddings, meetings, and other events. Their events site made people pick a single property before they could learn anything about it, so browsing meant going down a rabbit hole one site at a time. The Group Sales team’s own proposed fix was a robust filtering tool, letting people search by amenity and descriptor.

Research pointed the other way. A heavy filter was more likely to return zero results and lose people than help them. I pitched a workflow built around the one thing a person already knows when they arrive: the type of event they want to have. I mapped every existing page against the new workflow to see what needed to redirect and what was missing, then wireframed three reusable templates, a landing page, an event-type page, and a property page, and leaned on photography to do most of the persuading rather than dense copy. I also embedded a contextual form on every page, a general “need help” on the homepage, a specific “I have a question about weddings at Edgefield” on that property’s page, which gave the sales team better context on every incoming request before they picked up the phone.

The Group Sales team saw an increase in RFPs once the form had more visibility on the homepage, fewer calls asking for information that was already on the site, and positive feedback on how much the photography carried the pages. Overall site sessions increased, and revenue grew 10% over the same period the year before.

Screaming Circuits

Design Lead, Interaction Designer · Planet Argon · 2014 to 2016

Screaming Circuits, a prototype printed circuit board assembly facility, needed a backend overhaul alongside a real design and content strategy. Their quoting tool was built by engineers for engineers, but most of what Screaming Circuits actually offered was buried inside form fields, so even engineers using the tool regularly never learned the company’s full capabilities. The form itself caused frequent drop-offs and misquotes from human error, leading to repeat calls to customer service just to fix orders, and the homepage didn’t clearly say who Screaming Circuits was or what they did.

I worked with their team to simplify the quoting flow using smart logic, so fields guided people to the right specification instead of just collecting input and hoping it was right. Once an order was placed, I designed status visibility into the process so a customer could see where their prototype sat in the queue and know when to expect it, which mattered because uncertainty about shipping timelines was one of the biggest trust issues in the original research. Beyond quoting, I consolidated scattered how-to content into a single resource center and redesigned the marketing pages to actually tell Screaming Circuits’ story, replacing generic stock photography with real people.