ABOUT | visionarydesigner

I have been running successful projects in the Silicon Valley for over 20 years as an Interaction product designer and as a design lead with a full focus on user experience. I have lead teams to create many amazing and delightful applications. Most of which are used by fortune 500 companies.

I bring a complete set of design and business strategy experiences; UX, interaction product design, user research, information design, visual design, and motion design. I also offer special business development skills in both conducting and teaching designers how to facilitate design thinking techniques that bring together customers, product teams, engineering, executives, and sales teams. These creative problem solving and communication techniques have proven to be enormously successful in fully understanding customer needs resulting in the creation of happy customers, company-wide alignment, and a significant reduction of cost and time to market. These techniques are responsible for creating many innovative ideas and unexpected opportunities.

I have an innate gift or curse depending on how you look at it to scrutinize and problem-solve everything and I teach others how to see things that are often overlooked, ignored, or not yet recognized. I practice and teach creative thinking techniques that extract the most innovative ideas that make the user experiences great. I also really enjoy mentoring designers and inspiring other colleagues to motivate them to create work beyond their expectations.

My teams and I have created apps that have been optimized for all mediums. Web-based multi-tenant collaboration software, Native iOS and Android, responsive mobile web for both consumer and large data enterprises. And my contributions to this industry have given me special recognition by Adobe, IBM, Curious Labs, Siebel, Roxio, Target, Macy's, Procter and Gamble, ABB, and many others as one of the Valley's top UX (User Experience) experts.

My objectives remain the same; make it easy, intuitive, fast, effective, helpful, and delightful. And always make the user feel like a superstar.

The best thing is I love what I do, 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.

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.