Senior Product Designer (2023 - Present)
ClassDojo ---  Building a virtual world for kids to play together

Senior Product Designer (2020 - 2023)
Epic! For Kids ---  Leading digital reading platform for kids

• Partnered with PMs, data, research, and engineering to ship big initiatives in kid activation and kid growth (learning tools).

• Dove deeply into 1st day/week/month to understand barriers to kid and parent activation. Introduced  onboarding features to enhance content personalization and foster habit forming behaviors.

• Designed an unprecedented book “peek” feature — an innovative solution that enabled kids to preview books before they even open it. 

• Refreshed the quiz authoring (by teachers) and quiz taking (by kids) experiences. Added error detection to quiz authoring, leading to increased approval rates during content review.  Reimagined the kid quiz taking experience to enhance fun and delight, leading to a 15% lift in quiz usage. 

• Transformed the dictionary lookup feature into a vocabulary word search game, leading to a 60% lift in dictionary usage.

• Extended the longevity of badges by remodeling one-time-earn badges into upgradeable badges that could be earned over and over again.  Broadened badges into a highly flexible system capable of pushing multiple objectives: session depth, reading habits, topic discovery, special events, and more.  

• Significant contributor to the Epic design system. Well versed in Figma’s advanced features and building components to improve design/dev efficiency. Also worked with dev teams to establish a wholly designed-owned process for updating visual assets in product, removing the dev bottleneck.

Director of Product - Product Designer and Product Manager (2015 - 2020)
Square Panda Inc / D2M Inc ---  Edtech startup focused on early literacy

Product Designer

• Created data visualizations to help educators deep dive into student activity and track student strengths/weaknesses, including an innovative chart to map letter confusions.  Also designed reporting for district/school/classroom implementations. 

• Led the UX design of our 1st generation SDK --- the hub of the Square Panda system. Prepared flows to manage logging in, profiles, connecting to bluetooth peripherals, and more.

• Collaborated heavily with curriculum experts and game designers to design in-game wrong answer feedback systems that leveraged audio and visual prompting to provide learning moments to non-literate children.  

• Visually refreshed the SDK design system to align with new branding styles.

Product Manager (Primary Role)

• Led the design and development of Square Panda’s award winning 1st and 2nd generation product ecosystems --- lead product manager of all technical groups: hardware, firmware, software, games, and data science.  Successfully shipped 25+ products.  (See patent details below.)

• Conceived and drove implementation of an adaptive learning engine that tailored curriculum to learners based on their detected weaknesses.  Collaborated heavily with curriculum experts, developers, and UX researchers to balance complexity, scalability, and learning efficacy. Single-handedly built a spreadsheet-based simulator tool to grant curriculum and QA teams visibility into the adaptive system.

• Collaborated with sales and marketing leads to design and launch product platforms tailored to each market’s sales strategy: enterprise-style licensing for B2E (education), and SAAS subscriptions for B2C.

• Simultaneously managed the production of 10 game titles, web portal, and supporting services across 6 globally distributed development houses.  

Senior Mechanical Designer  (2015)
Mechanical Designer  (2011 - 2015)
D2M Inc  ---  Product design consultancy

• Mechanical and systems engineer providing full design services from concept to production. Applied design thinking to solve challenging hardware problems.

Patents

• Andrew Butler, Tom Boeckle, Hector Javier Farias, F Brian Iannce, Carey Lee. 2020. Phonics exploration toy. US Patent 10607502B2, filed June 03, 2015, and issued March 31, 2020. 

• Andrew Butler, F Brian Iannce, Carey Lee, Hector Javier Farias. 2019. Interactive phonics game system and method. US Patent 10380909B2, filed February 02, 2017, and issued August 13, 2019.

• Howard Edelman, Scott Ganaja, Irving M D Hu, Mani Razaghi Kashani, Carey Lee, Matt Vargas.  2017. Cold therapy systems and methods. US Patent 9566187B2, filed March 13, 2012, and issued February 14, 2017.

Certifications and Skills 

• Figma + Sketch

• After Effects + Keyshape

• Prototyping + Design thinking

Education

Stanford University
MS in Mechanical Engineering
Design Methodology
d.school