About Jim O'Brien

Howdy,

Thanks for dropping by to learn more about my experience and how I might be able to help your organization.

Having a robust background in UX design, I now bring nearly 5 years of dedicated management experience to the table. In this time, I have successfully led and mentored design teams, encompassing individuals with diverse skill sets and varying levels of expertise, including external contractors. I work to embody a servant-based leadership approach, providing support through authenticity and fostering trust. And while the work always has to get done, as a manager, the people still come first for me.

In addition to my leadership roles, I have contributed to a diverse array of projects in my 20+ years of experience, spanning from those brochure-ware websites for growing businesses to large B2C websites to large-scale commercial applications and everything in between. Beyond being responsible for the user interaction design (IxD) deliverables for most of these projects, such as task/user flows, wireframes, and design specifications, I have played a pivotal role in establishing design processes, crafting interface guidelines, and cultivating collaborative work environments. My design track record includes a history of successful design, training initiatives, and consulting services delivered across both the public and private sectors.

I thrive on supporting designers and their careers while still helping to deliver thoughtful solutions to the business and the customer through design.

How did I get here? Glad you asked.

An associate of mine, quite some time ago, had someone build them an ecommerce site so they could sell one of the products that, ironically, he and I both were selling at the time. What is commonplace today was cutting-edge and so cool back then, especially for an individual trying to do their own thing. As it turned out, this became the motivation for me to embark on what would become my new career.

What could go wrong for me, being an educated engineer with some unplanned industrial packing sales experience (mainly stretch film)? Talk about real imposter syndrome! What was I thinking?! 

It was not too much later when I woke up one morning and proclaimed, "I'm going to design websites!" And with that, I bought a couple thousand dollars worth of books and software; and the rest is...  you guessed it...  history.

I had decided to do my own thing. It was scary, exciting, fun, and concerning all at the same time back then to start a business around the then crazy notion of building websites for growing businesses. Jumping in and getting started, I taught myself everything, including the power of networking, HTML (when tables were used for page layout), how to make some cheesy graphics, and even some SEO (back before "SEO" was cool). This experience turned out to be the springboard for the rest of my career, which is pretty badass.

And here we are...