Aaron Sickler

Senior user design professional seeking new experiences in design and ability to continue building leadership, problem-solving, and design skills.

I have over 11 years of experience designing software applications for a wide range of user roles including teachers, students, IT administrators, business analysts, and business users while following Design Thinking and Agile methodologies.  

Throughout my career I have led multiple initiatives to create opportunities for critical external feedback to ensure products are designed to meet customer needs. These opportunities involve planning design studios at conferences to work with customers and building my own customer feedback program for my product assignments.

SKILLS AND DESIGNER TOOLS

  • Design Thinking
  • Agile development
  • Sketch
  • Invision Prototyping
  • Persona/role creation
  • Requirements gathering
  • User testing
  • Customer research
  • Balsamiq Mockups

 

INDUSTRY EXPERIENCE

IBM Watson Tutor Design Lead — 2015-present

  • Led interaction design and user research to create a digital cognitive tutor for college students in their online textbooks.
  • Sketch designs, Invision prototypes, and video demos helped lead to signing of $18million contract with first client.

IBM Watson Student Success Design Lead — 2015-2016

  • Led user research to define personas and goals to increase student retention by empowering students to take control of their higher education.
  • Design strategy led to initial signing of three sponsor universities for the first pilot.

IBM Watson Enlight for Educators Senior Designer — 2015-2016

  • Designed content management experience for teachers accessing trusted and reliable content to use in classrooms.
  • Decreased time spent by teachers looking for resources to use in their lessons.

IBM Navigator Solutions on Cloud Senior Designer — 2014-present

  • Led interaction design and research for cloud-based offerings for document and workflow management.
  • Provided interaction specifications, led design reviews, and collected external customer feedback.

IBM Enterprise Content Management User Design Lead — 2010-2015

  • Led design of 3 separate user experiences (administrative, business application creator, and business users) for managing tasks, workflows, and document management.
  • Built close partnerships across the entire product team and championed IBM design initiatives.
  • Applied design expertise across range of industry Case Manager solutions including counter-fraud management, post-emergency room healthcare management, and incident management for utility providers.

IBM Insight Conference Design Studio Co-lead — 2011-present

  • Co-coordinated the largest single customer-designer collaboration event at IBM to gather product feedback.
  • Provided a forum for customers to voice their opinions on current and future designs.
  • Successfully led building of initial new connections between designers and customers. 

Information Management/Enterprise Content Management — 2006-2009

  • Starting as a co-op I was afforded the opportunity to have many different design experiences working on variety of projects in areas such as data management, content management, and cross product solutions such as an oceanic shipment tracking application.  

EDUCATION

Ball State University, Muncie, IN — Masters of Information & Communication Sciences, 2006

Indiana University, Bloomington, IN Bachelor of Arts & Science- Telecommunications, 2003

References always available upon request.