I have been running successful design projects for over 23 years; both as a Product design director and a production designer. I have led teams to create some amazing and delightful applications; many are used by fortune 500 companies.
I bring a full stack of design experiences as a true creative problem solver. Some of my talents include business strategy, design leadership, design systems management, user research, user experience, interaction product design, visual design, motion design, and information design. I bring special skills in both conducting and teaching designers how to facilitate IDEO/IBM style design thinking techniques that bring customers, product teams, engineering, sales, and executives together. These problem-solving and communication techniques have proven to be enormously successful in creating happy customers, company-wide alignment, and a significant reduction in cost, complexity, and time to production. The result of practicing these techniques is responsible for creating many creative and innovative products and solutions and has uncovered many unexpected opportunities.
My teams and I have created applications that have been optimized for all mediums; cloud and on-prem multi-tenant collaboration software, native iOS, Android, and responsive mobile web for both large enterprises and consumer applications. Regardless of whom we are designing for, my objectives remain the same; make it easy, intuitive, fast, effective, helpful, and delightful. Create applications to assist the user and make the user feel like a superstar.
My contributions to this industry have given me special recognition by Adobe, IBM, Target, Kroger, Best Buy, Curious Labs, Siebel, Proter and Gamble, Macy’s, Verizon, Nvidia, Roxio (Sonic Solutions), and so many others as one of technologies top UX (User Experience) experts.
I started my career by embracing my gift to scrutinize and problem solve everything. I now teach others how to see and extract things that are often overlooked, ignored, or not yet recognized. I practice and teach creative thinking techniques that surface the best and most innovative ideas that make the user experiences great. And I wholeheartedly believe every experience matters.
I feel very fortunate to be able to do work that I love, and I grow more passionate about it every day.
A little about me
Personal recommendations
Venkat Krishnamurthy
VP, Product at OmniSci
I've had the pleasure of working with and knowing Christian as a product designer, manager, and person over the last couple of years at MapD/OmniSci, where he navigated all the trials and pressures of a startup to give the product its identity today. He joined us and helped set the foundation for our design team, by investing his time not just in product design but the design process itself.
He is not only a wonderful designer with an eye for detail and user experience but one of the best people managers I have ever worked with, bringing a great deal of empathy and understanding to this role to helping his team succeed. Above all, he is the very definition of a team player, who always values the team more than his own interests. I recommend him very highly
Christophe Viau
Design Technologist at OmniSci
I'm grateful that I got to work as a Design Technologist with Christian as my Director of Design and UX at OmniSci. His design thinking approach and his deep understanding of the whole pipeline, tools and best practices, helped me deliver my best work. IMO that's how you recognize a good manager, in the way people around him feel challenged and empowered. He brings a lot of creativity to a team. I like how he uncovers our blind spots and biases, turning that knowledge into new design paths and alternative solutions.
On top of a solid experience in UX, graphical design and product design, Christian has some rare management skills, always caring and taking the time for his team and beyond. One of his greatest qualities is the humility he uses as an asset to constantly improve. He added a solid process and a user-centric approach to our production. That's how I learned how much caring for users is about listening, about understanding what is behind what people are saying to find their actual needs. I learned a lot, but more importantly, I have a direction and a good model I can follow to continue improving my skills for the rest of my career thanks to his great leadership.
Duncan Lane
UX Product Designer at OmniSci
I had the pleasure and privilege of working under Christian’s great leadership. From the start not only did he recognized my potential, but he welcomed it and took actions to develop and mentor me to become the designer I am today.
Being a manager and also a fantastic designer, Christian has a unique eye and conceptual vision to lead the team to take any project from its raw form to successful reality, while paying close attention to our users and supporting their needs while providing them with a great experience.
Christian has a gift for connecting with people, building great relationships and collaborating effectively with entire teams to successfully deliver on our mission.
I would highly recommend him to any organization as he would be a valuable asset bringing creative outlook, passion, collaboration and positive attitude to any environment.
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JP Harvey
Director of Cloud Operations and Information Security at OmniSci
Christian is a hard worker with a passion for high standards in user experience and design, combined with a deep knowledge of how to make the complex simple. His role at OmniSci saw him face an ever-changing environment with pressures from multiple directions, and he handled it with aplomb.
Diana Tran
UX Design Lead at IBM
Christian was a devoted design lead and mentor at IBM. He has a great talent for building flexible interfaces to display complex data, and a passion to explore new interactions and visualizations.
He built strong relationships with customers of IBM products and continuously delivered results that satisfied the requests of users.
Christian showed genuine interest in teaching me about analytics and was devoted to developing my professional experience. It was a pleasure to work with Christian at IBM.
Siddhant Shah
Lead User Experience Designer at Apttus
Christian is a passionate designer who empathizes with users, creating excellent user experiences for complex enterprise applications.
I had the pleasure of working with Christian for over a year at Apttus where he led multiple design projects working closely with product managers, engineers, and fellow designers. In one of the crucial projects recently at Apttus, Christian generated a great amount of interest from executives, engineers, sales and marketing groups to participate and collaborate in the design thinking sessions with his unique design methodology and process. This was a well-received and much-needed interest from outside the UX team positively affecting the design team. Christian is a great listener, provides detailed feedback. I have learned fun design techniques and unique design processes from Christian that I hope to implement in my design process as well. Christian has a great sense of humor it has always been fun to work with him. I highly recommend Christian, as a design leader who can bring in, a great deal of value to any organization he is part of.
Dave Sundrum
Senior Product Designer at Apttus
Christian is a highly skilled UX professional. He has great skills at taking complex scenarios and designing very efficient and beautiful interfaces and interactions. He's very generous and passionate about our craft and excels as a mentor for his colleagues. He has great insight into UX design best practices and I thoroughly enjoyed working with him. I highly recommend him to anyone looking for a solid and superb UX designer.