My Resume

Senior Principal UX/Product Designer

michaelwhough@gmail.com | 312-451-3608 | linkedin.com/in/michaelwhough

Professional Summary

Senior UX and Product Designer specializing in complex, high-stakes environments: medical devices, fintech, and enterprise software. Expertise in user-centered design, interaction design, information architecture, and usability testing, with end-to-end capability from research and wireframing through prototyping and Figma delivery. Equally effective as a hands-on designer and cross-functional collaborator within Agile teams.

Professional Experience

Senior Principal User Experience / Interface Designer

Baxter: 05/2022 - 02/2026

Sole UX designer responsible for patient monitoring and IV infusion pump touchscreen interfaces, evolving a third party foundation into a fully owned design through iterative human factors studies and edge case resolution.
Designed device settings and initial setup experiences from scratch with no predefined requirements — work was exploratory and generative, with resulting designs directly informing and shaping the formal requirements process.
Translated ambiguous clinical requirements into clear, validated UX solutions for FDA-regulated medical device software.
Designed first-time device setup and unboxing experience, reducing friction for clinical staff during initial deployment.
Refactored UI component library in Figma using components and Auto Layout, improving design consistency and accelerating engineering handoff.
Extended design system standards to a hospital management web application, ensuring visual and interaction consistency across platforms.
Contributed to human factors study planning and iterative design improvements in collaboration with usability research teams.
Partnered with engineering to reduce design-development friction, improving specification clarity and implementation accuracy.

Senior Product Designer

Shift4 Payments: 07/2021 - 05/2022

Conducted qualitative research through SMB merchant interviews and usability testing to identify pain points and validate design decisions across multiple product areas.
Owned end-to-end UX design for a new gift card creation and sales feature within an existing merchant platform, covering both physical and digital card workflows.
Simplified a complex, multi-step loan application workflow for SMB merchants, reducing cognitive load and improving task completion through clear information hierarchy and progressive disclosure.
Led a comprehensive UX analysis of Lighthouse Business Manager — including heuristic evaluation, merchant interviews, wireframes, and user flows — resulting in simplified navigation, a redesigned menu structure, and improved analytics discoverability.

Senior UX/UI Designer

Jirav: 08/2020 - 07/2021

Sole designer for a financial planning platform serving CFOs and finance teams, collaborating directly with the CFO founder to deeply understand domain requirements and user mental models.
Translated complex financial driver modeling concepts into intuitive interaction patterns and information architecture, informed by ongoing collaboration with finance domain experts.
Owned end-to-end design of collaborative financial data workflows, balancing usability with sophisticated domain requirements for a technically fluent user base.
Designed a new in-product announcement system from scratch to improve feature adoption and user awareness across the platform.
Diagnosed usability issues through heuristic evaluation and user feedback, driving iterative UX improvements across multiple product areas.

Senior UX/UI Designer

Viewpoint: 09/2018 - 08/2020

Conducted field research on active construction sites to observe service technician workflows firsthand, directly informing mobile application design decisions.
Planned, conducted, and analyzed multiple usability tests for mobile applications, translating user insights into validated design improvements.
Designed a customizable mobile navigation system allowing construction workers to personalize workflows based on individual role and task patterns.
Designed a mobile clock-in/clock-out experience optimized for construction site conditions — prioritizing speed and glanceability for workers in the field.
Redesigned a form builder enabling field technicians to create custom forms with greater efficiency and fewer errors.
Researched common error states across the platform and designed a standardized error screen system adopted platform-wide, improving user comprehension and recovery consistency.

Contract UX/Interaction Designer

Baxter: 03/2018 - 09/2018

Sole UX designer driving strategy for at-home kidney dialysis medical device software used by clinical staff to manage patient care.
Grounded all design decisions in a comprehensive third-party research foundation — spent initial weeks immersed in field study reports and recorded user interviews before a single design decision was made.
Led re-architecture of navigation and information hierarchy to reduce cognitive load and simplify complex clinical workflows, directly informed by research findings.
Partnered with clinical SMEs to define patient data structures and presentation models appropriate for a regulated medical context.
Established simplified interaction patterns for navigating between patient records, enabling efficient context switching for clinical users managing multiple patients.

Contract UX/UI/Visual Designer

Cisco: 10/2017 - 02/2018

Sole UX designer leading the redesign of Cisco’s Customer Support Portal for enterprise IT customers, focused on improving usability and self-service task completion.
Designed search-driven workflows for case creation and case management, reducing friction for technically sophisticated users navigating complex support needs.
Designed a case detail experience enabling enterprise customers to efficiently track case progress and status.
Authored a comprehensive 33-page modular UX playbook for developers — a component-level specification library created mid-project when Cisco updated their design standards, ensuring implementation consistency across all portal flows.
Collaborated with engineering throughout to ensure designs were technically feasible and accurately implemented.

Senior UX/UI Designer/Architect

Oracle Textura: 08/2014 - 11/2017

Founded Textura’s UX practice from the ground up — recruited and mentored designers, established process, and embedded UX across 4–6 cross-functional product teams serving construction finance and payment workflows.
Drove strategy and execution of a unified style guide across multiple enterprise applications, establishing platform-level consistency, scalability, and improved usability.
Led UX and interaction design for a secure two-factor authentication solution for a banking application, balancing regulatory compliance with a low-friction user experience.