Andrew Otwell

LabKey makes data management and workflow software for life sciences. I'm in a principal-level individual contributor role leading the UX for our products.

  • Design leadership & experience strategy for lab sample inventory management and biologics development tools, introduced design thinking and methods at LabKey, including design sprints and experience visions.
  • Responsible for the design and end-to-end experience in every phase of projects: user interviews,requirements and use case definition, workflow & information architecture, and detailed interaction design.
  • Collaborate closely with all product teams across LabKey to deliver new features and iteration on existing ones.
  • Continuously working to bring a human-centric perspective to deeply technical products.

Zillow is the largest real-estate site in North America. I led UX for Zillow’s main property search experiences across platforms, used by tends of millions of home shoppers daily.

  • I led the a major industry compliance project, a multi-year cross-company effort at Zillow that directly impacted every user of the site.
  • Ran design workshops for cross-company efforts around home touring, including virtual touring. Led teams through new idea generation and prioritization, and also to create a strategic design concepts.
  • A design brief I wrote on the future of search experiences at Zillow kicked off to a broad strategic investment into personalization. I’ve continued to lead the design work for this project, including leading a cross-functional team to design and prototype personalized experiences.
  • Created internal design tools, including a guide to UX Strategy at Zillow that teaches UX designers an approach to working strategically by analyzing four case studies from the company. I also wrote a guide for designers and Product Managers about how to create useful and compelling product principles.
  • In 2017-2018, I shipped two major releases of the 3D Home iOS app, an innovative tool that lets anyone with an iPhone create immersive 3D property tours.

Leafly.com is the "World's Cannabis Information Resource", and the most popular site in the cannabis industry. My work was a hybrid role of both UX design and Product Management for business-facing tools and the consumer-facing site. I shipped several products at Leafly:

  • Launched a ground-up redesign of our main business-facing tool used by thousands of cannabis dispensaries
  • Launched an extension of that that tool to cannabis Brands, new business client segment for the company
  • Launched the consumer-facing Leafly Product Catalog
  • Managed roadmaps, prioritization, and bug triaging for these products as well as the Leafly.com site

Google Cloud Platform is a suite of products that let software developers build applications on Google’s computing infrastructure. The UX team I worked on owned GCP's Management Console, which lets customers configure and manage virtual computing, file and data storage and application services.

I provided design leadership to a sub-team of 5 UX Designers and 3 User Researchers, supporting several major Google Cloud Platform products:

  • Identity & Access Management (IAM)
  • Billing
  • Cloud Launcher, an 'app store' for the Platform with both customer- and business-facing components
  • Security features
  • User Onboarding

As a UX manager, I also set UX team priorities and work with peers in Product Management and Engineering to set roadmaps and priorities.

As part of the UX management team, I was responsible for reviewing UX designs and research across the 50+ person UX team and helping define and shape our UX review process.

As Senior UX Designer for DoubleClick’s enterprise search engine marketing (SEM) advertisting management tool I was UX lead for features including:

  • Support for AdWords Shopping Campaigns and Product Listing Campaigns
  • A "Campaign Cloner" tool which halved the amount of time needed to build out typical SEM campaigns
  • Support for AdWords Dynamic Search Ads
  • URL Template Builder, which allowed many customers to manage landing page URLs inside DoubleClick Search, instead of tedious manual work in Excel

I also managed a UX designer and two User Experience Researchers. I led this small team to support 7 Product Managers and about 100 Engineers.

I also was one of a small team of designers that created an internal Angular Javascript-based prototyping framework now used across Google's Ads UX team. I wrote several components for the framework, created about 20 pages of user guides and sample code, and taught several internal classes on the framework for designers and prototypers in Google.

Provided leadership, mentorship, and design direction for a group of 6 UX designers and 2 design technologists responsible for the core retail e-commerce experience of Amazon.com for more than 100 million customers worldwide. Our responsibilities included the Amazon.com homepage, product detail pages, and checkout experience across desktop and mobile browsers.

In my role as manager, I provided high-level program guidance, reviewed designs, and participated in strategic and tactical efforts. Also recruited, assessed, hired, developed, and retained outstanding UX designers in my department and across Amazon.

At Amazon I helped build a design community across the company. In 2010, I established a cross-company forum for designers to share and discuss work, which has run twice-monthly continuously since (even years after my leaving the company.) In 2012, I organized Amazon's first internal UX conference.

Senior lead UX designer for the worldwide Amazon retail checkout experience. As the sole designer on this program, led the redesign of major components of this part of the site, including payments handling, shipping, order placement, and the Amazon Shopping Cart, all of which resulted in significant improvements in key business metrics.

Worked with product management and software development teams to define roadmaps. Wrote design documentation, created UI wireframes, sitemaps, interaction flows, and built highly-interactive data-driven prototypes in CSS, HTML, and Javascript/jQuery.

Managed two Senior UX designers.

Helped evolve the customer experience of the Mechanical Turk service by producing design plans, detailed UI documentation, and production assets. Designed and ran low-cost usability tests to generate product ideas and prioritize fixes.

Built several highly interactive prototypes in HTML/CSS/ Javascript to explore design ideas and test rapidly with customers. From this work, I created a generalized Javascript-based rapid prototyping framework that I continued to use on many later projects.

Partnered with product management and software development to launch, test, and iterate new features.

Interaction designer for a suite of cloud infrastructure management applications during two major and several minor releases.

Hand-wrote all XHTML and CSS for standards-based application user interfaces designed to be rapidly customized and reskinned.

Worked closely with developers, product managers, and sales consultants to define user model and interaction flow, using storyboards, wireframe mockups, and prototypes.

Design consulting on educational software projects. Introduced weblogs for internal project communication.

Information architecture and interaction design for a semiconductor trade group product catalog site. Designed and built a knowledge base CMS for the company.

Information architecture and interaction design for client projects.

Developed and taught "Pixel Line Plane: Elements of Digital Craft," a semester class in computational design and visual thinking for undergraduate and graduate students at UT.

Software development in Director and Flash. Trained faculty, staff, and students on web design, programming, and multimedia software applications.

Macromedia Director Lingo programming for educational software.

  • MA in Art History, The University of Texas at Austin
  • BA, Connecticut College
  • HS, Sidwell Friends School