DIA Design Guild

I formalized the program structure, introduced scalable processes, and implemented a CSAT measurement system to improve program effectiveness and participant satisfaction.

Key achievements include:
• Scaling the Apprenticeship Program: Formalized a structured 9-month mentorship model, improving project outcomes and skill development for junior designer apprentices.
• Mentorship & Talent Development: Recruited and managed senior designers to provide high-quality guidance for junior designers.
• Improved Project Management & Client Satisfaction: Developed formalized project management processes, leading to clearer expectations and increased satisfaction from client stakeholders.

Design Program Manager

Design Evangelist

Design Mentor & Instructor
Combining both teaching and mentoring, I have over 10,000 hours of experience.

• Served as an instructor at leading institutions, such as General Assembly, GrowthX Academy, Flatiron School, Seattle School of Visual Concepts, Product School, UC Berkeley, and Academy of Art University
• Developed curriculum for top programs, including Springboard, GrowthX Academy, Interaction Design Foundation, IxDF Bootcamps, Flatiron School, Product School, UC Berkeley, and Chegg
• Mentored through various community, bootcamp, and organizational programs

Design Educator

Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design

I overhauled school management operations, replacing outdated systems with a modern, scalable solution that improved class scheduling and operational efficiency. I also optimized design tooling and software resources, reducing costs and improving data accessibility.

Key achievements include:
• Scaling Course Offerings: Implemented a new school management system, enabling the organization to increase concurrent class capacity by 300%.
• Cost Reduction: Standardized design tools and software, eliminating inefficiencies and saving $100K annually.
• Data & Process Improvement: Applied information architecture principles to improve data accessibility and reduce data duplication by 90%.

Design Operations Manager

The Hired Guns

Worked in a fast-paced agency environment, specializing in design recruiting while also improving knowledge management for the team.

Key achievements include:
• Candidate Evaluation: Reviewed and evaluated 100+ UX designer candidate profiles and portfolios, assessing qualifications and fit for various design roles.
• Process & Knowledge Management: Built a Notion-based knowledge management system to document onboarding, create consistency in projects, and streamline the recruiting process. This significantly reduced the time required to train and onboard new employees.

Design Talent Partner

LinkedIn

I redesigned and standardized LinkedIn’s UX Design onboarding program, ensuring new UX designers could seamlessly transition into any product team and become productive faster.

Key achievements include:
• Onboarding Standardization: Designed and implemented a new UX designer onboarding program to improve ramp-up time and team integration.

IxDF - Interaction Design Foundation

• Led daily operations and strategic initiatives, implementing best practices to optimize the UX Design Bootcamp program 
• Increased member insights by 5% by instigating a regular research program
• Improved project planning and scheduling for UX Design boot camps, strategized new educational initiatives and created original UX course content

Flatiron School

I led Flatiron School’s San Francisco UX program, managing faculty and ensuring the successful graduation and job placement of cohorts of 20 design students. I introduced a cross-disciplinary collaboration program between UX and software engineering students, giving them hands-on experience working together.

Key achievements include:
• Student Success & Placement: Led Flatiron’s San Francisco UX program, ensuring strong job placement outcomes.
• Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration: Built a structured program for UX designers and software engineers to collaborate on projects.
• Curriculum Improvements: Implemented course changes that led to a 20% increase in exercise scores.

Design Program Director

GrowthX Academy

I built and scaled GrowthX Academy’s UX design program from the ground up, designing an industry-aligned curriculum that prepared students for real-world careers. The program achieved a 90% job placement rate, and I oversaw the development of 40+ functional prototypes for web, mobile, and IoT clients through hands-on, project-based learning.

Key achievements include:
• Program Creation & Growth: Designed and launched an industry-aligned UX design program, achieving a 90% student placement rate.
• Client Project Experience: Guided student teams in developing 40+ functional prototypes for real clients, reinforcing practical UX skills through hands-on client collaboration.

Epsilon

I led a cross-functional team of 8, including UX designers, UI designers, and content strategists, delivering solutions for 10+ B2B and B2C clients annually, including Wells Fargo, American Express, Apple, Google, Cisco, and Genentech.

Key achievements include:
• Enterprise UX Leadership: Managed UX strategy and execution for Fortune 500 clients across finance, tech, and healthcare.
• Design Systems & Efficiency: Created scalable design systems, style guides, and component libraries to improve consistency across projects.
• UX Training & Advocacy: Led client workshops to strengthen teams' understanding of customer experience best practices.

Design Manager, Digital Design

TripIt

Drove mobile and web design for a top travel app. Implemented data-driven design practices and led design reviews to ensure high-quality releases.

Lead Product Designer

I'm a design program manager with a background in UX, interaction design, and education. I bring structure to design teams and help programs run smoothly.

I've worked across both industry and education, and I’m especially drawn to roles that support design teams building thoughtful, education-focused experiences. I thrive in environments where I can contribute behind the scenes—helping teams stay aligned, focused, and connected to the needs of users and businesses.

Over my career, I've built and led design operations initiatives, UX education programs, and onboarding optimization at organizations ranging from startups to global tech companies. I’ve formalized design processes, standardized tools, and improved cross-team alignment, helping companies scale efficiently while maintaining a strong design culture.

I’m passionate about solving organizational challenges that impact design teams, whether it’s streamlining workflows, improving collaboration between teams, or developing scalable solutions for talent growth.

Always open to connecting with others (include a note) working at the intersection of design, education, and impact-driven work.

Julia DeBari

Level 11 Technology

Building Level 11 Technology, an Apprenticeship Agency. The agency will hire early-career digital technologists and pay them to get their first year of real world experience in a ‘teaching hospital’ format. Knowledge workers, like journeyman-level skilled tradespeople, need guidance, supervision and mentorship for their first year to gain the industry-recognized and valued experience needed to be effective employees.

Founder

The Maigen Thomas Experience

• Provide UX consulting and design services to small businesses and local government agencies, with a focus on usability, inclusive design and accessibility recommendations to align with Section 508 requirements and WCAG 2.0.
• Deliver hands-on usability and accessibility workshops at conferences and community events. 
• Manage multiple concurrent projects in various stages of UX research and design, supervising teams of 2-7 early-career designers in their rigorous application of best practices and methods while they gain real-world experience.
• Worked with small to mid-size companies to develop organizational UX maturity and create UX strategy.

Principal UX Consultant

Hireology

• Developed custom gamification strategy for mobile app to drive behavioral modification in core user group 
• Reducing median time to hire by 50% YoY across all major verticals
• Achieved conversion rate of 40% with new features

Sr. UX Designer

UC Berkeley Extension

• Deliver a high-energy, engaging student experience teaching a 24-week, 930+ hour immersive boot camp with a multidisciplinary approach to user experience design, user research, design thinking, product development, usability, accessibility and inclusive design practices. 
• Lead a team of TAs, career advisors and student engagement staff in providing support, mentorship and a competitive edge to 30+ students in each cohort.
• Provide mentorship, support and training to new instructors and TAs.
• Represent instructional staff and curriculum, and provide an in-depth, day-in-the-life overview of the bootcamp learning experience on quarterly marketing webinars delivering intro workshops that present the UX/UI bootcamp opportunity to 100’s of prospective students.

Instructor, UX/UI Bootcamp

Led the curriculum team in designing and developing blended UX/UI courses, ensuring high-quality course materials are created, and courses fulfill their objectives while providing a quality student experience.

• Research, write and develop multimodal curriculum for a skills-based, blended learning bootcamp product preparing students for high-growth careers in the UX and tech industries.
• Develop detailed lesson plans, grading rubrics and practical, hands-on learning experiences and activities based on real-world methods and industry best practices with a focus on inclusive design and designing for accessibility. 
• Collaborate with teams from Instructional Design, Graphic Design, Editorial and QA to provide subject matter expertise and contextual knowledge to integrate learning development.
• Evangelize UX across all business bootcamps, providing learning materials and support to teams incorporating design thinking and user research methods into curriculum.
• Deliver continuous integration of content updates to existing (legacy) curriculum during concurrent pilot testing of blended curriculum in multiple markets.

Lead Learning Innovation Analyst - UX/UI Bootcamps

Research and write curriculum, create and test activities, worksheets, design challenges and learning assessments.

UX/UI Bootcamp Curriculum Designer 

Syntellis Performance Solutions

• Provided UX research, design and testing as a shared service across multiple agile teams for six flagship products in the enterprise healthcare management space: Capital Planning, Capital Tracking, Purchasing, Contract Management, Rolling Forecasts and Treasury Cash Management.
• Developed user flow maps, conducted usability and accessibility testing, redefined and simplified complex workflows, rapidly developed wireframes and wireflows for new concepts, contributed to design system documentation, delivered presentations to executive stakeholders.

Lytics

• Conducted competitive analysis research, usability and accessibility assessments to prepare for designing a more efficient self-service onboarding experience to increase adoption and conversion rates while reducing support costs for mid-market customers.

Sr. UX Designer 

Evanta, a Gartner Company

• Combined industry best practices, user research and business requirements to design and implement a best-in-class web experience on Adobe Experience Manager that is optimized for lead capture and conversion, and aligns with parent company brand and experience. 
• Created user journey maps, site/system flows, site architecture diagrams, and interactive prototypes as part of the iterative product design process. 
• Presented design solutions to executive leadership team and other stakeholders, outlining design decisions, and incorporating feedback into an iterative cycle. 
• Led user research, usability validation and acceptance testing to define a modern user experience that enables the business to meet mission critical priorities and deliver a world-class executive product to the Fortune 1000.

Sr. UX/UI Designer

Complí

Compli was purchased by KPA, and my role was among those eliminated.

• Designed intuitive, human-centered user interfaces for enterprise white-label cloud-based flagship compliance and workforce process management product by leveraging design best practices that translate abstract concepts into intuitive and elegant experiences.
• Produced detailed and annotated wireframes, mockups, and interactive prototypes that effectively and efficiently communicated design solutions.
• Streamlined complex user experience flows and improved content design with contextual information to reduce users time-on-task.
• Conducted user research, interviews, and surveys to validate data-driven design decisions.
• Advocated for user needs while balancing development time constraints and web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG).
• Created conceptual look and feel options, building user interface components at an atomic level. 
• Documented design specifications in a detailed design system for development.
• Demonstrated creative approach to problem solving, innovation and issue resolution.
• Evangelized human-computer interaction best practices as part of a multi-disciplinary team.

UX Designer 

Unigo Group

As part coder and part designer, I worked on a hard-working Agile team to define, design and deliver on the company’s product vision. 

• Updated, redesigned and refreshed the UI to align with responsive web design best practices.
• Designed mobile-first for a seamless and efficient user experience, focusing on highest trafficked pages, while adhering to brand guidelines and standards.
• Revamped the review intake process by designing a fun and streamlined experience that combines slick quiz elements with an easy to understand star rating system.
• Transitioned many pages on the site from ASP.NET into C#/Umbraco, enabling the company to rapidly engage users with updated information.
• Designed a complex, personalized experience for primary user groups, developing an exciting and engaging center from which the user starts their journey.
• Developed a new responsive web UI for a blog from a bare framework. 
• Enhanced the user experience for mobile devices on a site receiving over 250,000 unique traffic hits per month.
• Optimized ad delivery and creation of unique content delivery based on user experience and data analysis.
• Increased website performance with mobile enhancements and responsive, optimized image rendering, contributing to 20% performance increase.
• Created detailed Photoshop and Illustrator mockups for non-technical staff to communicate design possibilities.

Front End Developer / UX Designer

Maigen Thomas is the founder of Level 11 Technology, an Apprenticeship Agency. She has over 10 years of experience in enterprise software design and product development, and almost as many years of experience teaching and mentoring. Prior to creating Level 11 in April 2024, she was a Sr. UX Designer for an HR technology company and taught 3 cohorts of the 6-month UX/UI (User Experience and User Interface Design) Bootcamp at UC Berkeley.

Maigen's specialization is in website accessibility and she focuses on helping organizations with under $25m in revenue increase their market share by reaching up to 15% more potential customers and decrease the likelihood they’ll be a target for costly digital accessibility lawsuits or fines. She gets excited to empower folks at all levels of the business (and technology experience) with knowledge to ensure inclusive experiences for all of their customers, regardless of their level of ability or disability. Not just because it’s legally required, but because it’s good business.

If organizations choose not to find and fix the accessibility issues on their website, they are potentially missing out on the $1T in spending power the 1.3 Billion people with disabilities globally have (and run the risk of expensive digital accessibility lawsuit settlements). Ultimately, Level 11 seeks to work with government agencies to ensure services are available to all constituents equitably.

Level 11 Technology is an Apprenticeship Agency, a unique business model like a “teaching hospital” where Apprentices get paid to get their first year of experience. Level 11 Apprentices spend a year learning how to design and develop accessibility-first websites that serve all customers, regardless of their level of ability or disability.

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If you are an early-career UX designer, READ THIS: I teach ux designers how to assess a website for accessibility and usability and make a case study showing how they would improve the website. It can be conducted by an in-house designer (or front-end developer, actually), or by a bootcamp graduate trying to get real world experience (when they can't get a job without real world experience). ASK ME HOW, it's FREE

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Julia DeBari

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