Hi, I'm Jon
I’m an AI integrated, and purpose driven Product Designer.
About me
I’m a seasoned product designer with 6+ years designing products and 4+ years experience working in innovative, high-growth startups. Most recently, I was the Director of Product Design at Scoot
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I care deeply about my impact in the world, and am always striving towards my Ikigai in the technology and design space.
Jump to my case studies
Experience
My first real job was in high school, where I interned at an architecture firm, thinking I was going to go on to become the next Frank Lloyd Wright. It took me all of three months to realize I was terrified of the idea of working on a single project for years, or sometimes decades. But, I knew I wanted to build, design and solve problems. Fast forward 4 years, a stint in the construction industry, one degree, one design bootcamp, and a couple internships later. I found myself at my first “real” design job working at ALTR - A data security SaaS out of Austin, TX.
ALTR
Jun ‘20 - Jun ‘22
I was hired as a summer UX intern working on various side projects for ALTR while they sussed out my skills. After 3 months, they offered me a full-time contract position, and I was given a role on the product team. At the time, the company was between senior design hires, resulting in me being thrust into the fire as the sole designer at the company. I was quickly tasked with designing every feature for ALTR, I was working hard, making mistakes, but learning a ton.
After about three more months, the company hired a very senior UX designer (phew), that became my mentor for the next year and a half. Together we fixed a pretty broken user experience, designed data analytics and control features, and created an established UX practice at the company for the first time. I saw the product go from no real enterprise users, to over 10 enterprise customers and hundreds of daily active users.
In a lot of ways, this experience allowed me to cut my teeth as a professional start up designer.
After about three more months, the company hired a very senior UX designer (phew), that became my mentor for the next year and a half. Together we fixed a pretty broken user experience, designed data analytics and control features, and created an established UX practice at the company for the first time. I saw the product go from no real enterprise users, to over 10 enterprise customers and hundreds of daily active users.
In a lot of ways, this experience allowed me to cut my teeth as a professional start up designer.
After a couple years at ATLR, I felt the call to explore and create outside of the context of b2b SaaS (let’s be real, it can get a little dry sometimes). I decided to go back to school, and study design and technology for the first time in academia. I enrolled in an engineering program where I could explore the intersections of creative technology and design. I learned to code creatively, to use programming to fabricate sculpture and objects, and got to work on some awesome UX and product design projects. While in grad school, I met a guy named Alex. We were both jazzed about meditation, health and wellness, and wearable tech. We decided to experiment together making our own wearable tech product called Zephyr.
Zephyr
Oct '22 - Oct '23
Zephyr was a class project that grew into something bigger. The problem: Most people are living lives with an overly activated nervous system - as a result, they often take medication, or self soothe with unhealthy lifestyle choices. The solution: create a user experience that allows people to tap into a free, effective, and virtually limitless tool for regulating their nervous system: their breath. We designed a wearable wristband and an app that uses guided breathing and haptic feedback to allow people to identify when they’re in a dysregulated state, and return to a parasympathetic state of nervous system regulation using a metric called heart rate coherence. Read more about it here. We never made it to market, but received multiple rounds of seed funding and an award with our proof of concept.
About one year into the program, I was feeling the itch to keep building things in the real world, and I found a company that was using video-game like interactions to help people connect more effectively online. I was excited to design a novel and immersive UX for the enterprise, so I decided to take the job at Scoot.
Scoot
July ‘23 - Aug ‘25
I was dying to do some real, practical work outside of academia when I joined scoot, and I fell into the job very quickly. I worked my butt off and got promoted the Director of Product Design not long after getting hired - Scoot entrusted me with the reigns to lead design and it felt great. I got to design Scoot’s entire event platform, their presentation mode, and I got the product ready to go to market for the first time as a sales tool. I also designed their suite of AI and LLM tools that allowed hosts and participants to leverage all sorts of the data collected during meetings to help them connect, and sell more effectively.
While I was at scoot, we found our first strong product market fit, and I got to be part of our biggest fortune 500 deals and first large scale customer events. This was my first real experience leading design for a company and having a lot of agency over my work - I gained a lot of confidence in my own leadership, product management, decision making, and strategizing skills.
Eventually, I felt the itch to work on some more purpose driven projects and I left Scoot to pursue the next phase.
While I was at scoot, we found our first strong product market fit, and I got to be part of our biggest fortune 500 deals and first large scale customer events. This was my first real experience leading design for a company and having a lot of agency over my work - I gained a lot of confidence in my own leadership, product management, decision making, and strategizing skills.
Eventually, I felt the itch to work on some more purpose driven projects and I left Scoot to pursue the next phase.
In addition to the experiences above, I’ve gotten to help a few other companies and YC founders with their products on the side, but we can save those stories for another day.
References
I’ve been lucky enough to work with some incredibly talented, creative, and kind folks.
Jon is a talented designer with a thoughtful approach to his work. He has a solid understanding of user experience across various devices and platforms. He also has a really good eye and knows what is beautiful and what is not. We worked together on some of our more innovative features, many of which had no analogues in the market, such as Scoot Mingle mode. Jon pioneered the design of our Special Access Groups, an important feature set for Scoot.
Ed Stevens
CEO and Founder at Scoot
I had the pleasure of working with Jon on a few different UX initiatives for our company to improve our user experience. Jon's expertise in UX design and his ability to quickly understand our business needs was truly impressive. He provided invaluable insights and recommendations that allowed us to improve our product's usability and enhance our customers' experience. His professionalism, responsiveness, and attention to detail were top-notch, and he was a pleasure to work with throughout the project. I would highly recommend Jon for any UX design project, and I hope to have the opportunity to work with him again in the future.
Shawn Wood
CTO at Reflection Sciences
I hired and directly managed Jon while he was working at ALTR. Jon gladly takes on large product work. He will research and mock up thoughtful solutions. Whether it’s a new product feature, or solving an issue in the product, he takes pride in the UX process. We already miss him on our morning stand ups.
Kate McCarter
Senior Product Designer at DataDog
It was fantastic to work with Jonathan, who is an exceptional UX designer. Jonathan is self-motivated, reliable, and his forward-thinking approach really helped guide our project goals for BoothIQ in the right direction. He is truly a pleasure to work with and an extremely valuable team-player.
Prianka Dhir
Product Marketing Manager at PCMA
Case Studies
I’ve had the opportunity to design groundbreaking data security and governance features, create a segment-defining immersive event platform, design AI agents, and conversational chat experiences, and try my hand as a founding designer for a biometric and haptic integrated health wearable.
Scoot
Empowering Sales People with Immersive Virtual Event Data - Agentic Social Data design
ALTR
Locate, Define, and Secure Data - SaaS Feature Design
ALTR
Taking a 7% Activation Rate to The Moon - User Research and Onboarding