Will Shown

👋 I’m Will — I’m a UXer, which in my case means mostly engineering, sometimes design, and occasionally writing & research. I have a deep wealth of experience delivering products for professionals & experts, always with a keen focus on practicality & inclusivity. I strive to build community every day, to which end I’m also a leader in two nonprofit cooperatives.

Work

  1. DXOS

    1. Senior UX Engineer

      — to

      Designing and building app experiences for the DXOS platform. Contributing to the architecture of the UI extensibility model. Creating and maintaining design systems and packages for the DXOS ecosystem.

  2. Microsoft

    1. UX engineer: Teams developer experiences

      — to

      Built and released Fluent Blocks, an open source library of React components (@fluent-blocks/react) for the Fluent design system to help app developers produce more consistent and usable experiences. Mitigated numerous accessibility bugs in the Teams Developer Portal and integrated Fluent Blocks into the product. Created tool for generating color palettes & themes procedurally, called “LAB curved color system tool”.

    2. UX engineer consultant: Teams, via Kforce

      — to

      Built and released an initial library of React components (@fluentui/react-teams) for the Teams design system to help app developers produce more consistent and usable experiences.

  3. Accord Cooperative

    1. Founding director

      — to

      Designed and built a Slack app to help run more methodical, robust democratic processes (accord.coop). Collaborated with STAR Voting to promote that voting method.

  4. CrowdStrike

    1. Senior UX designer

      — to

      Helped to establish and proliferate a new design system for CrowdStrike’s Falcon Console for administering security operations. Collaborated with the broader team to improve clarity and reliability in the design workflow. Designed and shipped host-based firewall management in the Falcon Console.

  5. AMBOSS GmbH

    1. Lead UX designer

      — to

      Founded the UX design practice at AMBOSS, established the beginnings of an agile workflow, set up a common design system, and grew the UX team from just myself to 4 designers and one user researcher. Under my leadership we began redesigning and redeveloping AMBOSS’s flagship product to be friendlier to new users, more testable and iterable, and more usable in general.

    2. UX designer & engineer

      — to

      Designed and built a media viewer and the internal tooling necessary for bringing in-house illustrations into a highly interactive and portable experience. In this process I advocated for and implemented a more robust workflow for the front-end, including automated tests, builds, and code reviews.

  6. Microsoft

    1. UX designer & engineer: WDG

      — to

      As part of the envisioning team in Windows, I designed and engineered ideas for the future of content experiences. Many of these concepts were far-reaching and called for new 3D techniques and the latest technologies. The final designs and prototypes acted as tangible evidence that the future was within reach, and guided the design group’s continuing work.

    2. UX designer & engineer: AMP & MSN

      — to

      Designed common features and built prototypes of new ideas for Bing/MSN apps, the new MSN.com, and other projects. Many of the apps I’ve contributed to come pre-installed on the latest Windows devices including desktops, tablets, and phones, and the new MSN is live at msn.com.

  7. Apigee

    1. UI engineer

      — to

      Designed and built developer-user experiences for Apigee. I was tasked with conceptualizing, prototyping, and shipping Apigee’s first web portal for clients in close coordination with the UX design team. Our portal visualized and made interactive the components of Apigee’s API gateway.

  8. TownHog

    1. UI engineer

      — to

      Built websites and website components using image sprites and finely-honed HTML and CSS such that the product was compatible with even very old browsers. I also worked on several internal tools written in Ruby.

Education

  1. McGill University

    1. B.A. & Sc. Honours Cognitive Science

      — to

      Focused on topics in cognitive and computational psychology, linguistics, philosophy of science, and computer science, with two undergraduate research theses in neural networks and a minor in Japanese language.