Karen Penlington

Leading a team of UX and UI designers in high education.

Lead UX UI designer responsible for authoring and documenting digital user experiences for Western Governors University’s (WGU) prospective and current students. Demonstrates a solid experience in crafting digital user experiences using proven planning, research and collaboration principles and tools. Collaborate closely with other strategists, designers, writers, and stakeholders to develop meaningful products, standards, and UX blueprints that aid the creative and messaging efforts across the organization.  

• UX lead in creating the user experience and user interface of an internally developed assessment evaluation application to replace third-party vendor application. Application requires various UIs to service students, evaluators, and evaluation management. Application will be accessible in desktop, responsive, and native mobile app formats.
• Teamed with entire UX team – designers and UI developers – to design and implement a complete UI update to the look and feel of the student portal. This required much collaboration and coordination to go live successfully with very little negative impact to the students.
• Mentored new UX designers through the WGU student portal environment during their onboarding process. Continued to guide and collaborate as the designers took on their own projects.
• Collaborates with User Researcher to define specific goals of user focus groups and usability tests in order to validate designs, pinpoint user pain points, and define user’s needs.

Lead UX projects in all stages of development of mobile, tablet, and desktop products from concept through working product. Provide innovative user experience designs, user interface designs, and visual designs. Conduct usability studies, customer/user interviews, A/B testing, and UI reviews. Create conceptual designs, workflows, wire frames, and low- and high-fidelity prototyping. Analyze user interface problems and create on-brand design solutions that meet business goals. Develop use cases and high-level requirements. Create and revise visual assets such as icons, UI graphics, wizard pages, and buttons. Collaborate with product owners, product managers, customers, engineers, and UX designers to deliver quality designs and implementation.

• Enabled more efficient and unified development of multi-platform products by leading development of a corporate design language and component library with hundreds of variations.
• Guided company’s overall user experience and future directions to support development of cross-device applications and bring greater functionality, usability, and design to our flagship product.
• Spearheaded big data handling project aiming to create individualized, visual representations of big data.
• As senior team member, advise 6-person team, reviewing work, sharing resources, and driving performance.

Senior UX Visual Designer (2004-2012)
Visual Designer (2001-2004)
Associate Visual Designer (2000-2001)

Promoted within UX team tasked with creating conceptual designs, RDLs, prototypes, user interface guidelines, and final product graphics. Consistently increase the usability of products while maintaining strong corporate brand. Participated in usability testing. Created print materials for internal events and displays. Prepared final layout of product manuals for print and created product manuals in PDF format for software release.

• Increased usability and learnability by contributing on many versions of user experience guidelines to create a consistent experience across all products.
• Decreased development hours for all projects by contributing to an HTML prototype toolbox based on UI guidelines.
• Worked on product teams across multiple releases, continually adding value and heightening the brand experience.
• Contributed on team that spearheaded initiative to create a unified user interface to products brought in through acquisition; made presentation to executive board to integrate new products under our branding.