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Languages
- English – kyle speaks english fluently, it is his mother tongue.
- Spanish – Kyle is proficient at living in Spanish, but is a little short of being able to use it for work. In design research, he would not moderate a session in Spanish, but can follow the conversation without a translator for the most part.
- Chinese – Kyle learned some Chinese when he lived in China, but never really got above an HSK II. Today, he can barely speak any chinese and can understand very little.
- German – Kyle was once good enough at German to take a semester’s worth of design courses. The courses were in German, though Kyle responded in a mix of English and German. That was back in 2011, and he really hasn’t spoken any serious German since then, so he probably can’t understand much now.
Global Traveller
Kyle has worked abroad extensively.
Countries Kyle has conducted design research in
| Country | Research Topic | Notes | Company |
|---|---|---|---|
| Netherlands | Accounting / Knowledge management software | This was while Kyle was at Frog Design. The client is confidential. We were working on a global knowledge base for a Fortune 100 accounting company. | Frog Design (client confidential) |
| Mexico | Remittances & Health Care | This was while Kyle was working for MedicSana. He interviewed Mexicans living in the US who sent money home and doctors in Mexico who received the money to take care of the family members of people sending the money home. The goal was to understand the shortcomings of payment systems as well as the information that families needed to have share. | MedicSana |
| El Salvador | Remittances & Health Care | This was while Kyle was working for MedicSana. He interviewed Salvadoreans living in the US who sent money home and doctors in El Salvador who received the money to take care of the family members of people sending the money home. The goal was to understand the shortcomings of payment systems as well as the information that families needed to have share. | MedicSana |
| China | car sharing | While Kyle was working for frog design in their Shanghai office, he was on a team that conducted a research project across Shanghai, Guanzhou, and Chengdu to understand habits and preferences around a major car sharing company. The research consisted of trying out the service, interviewing around 30 users (including ride-along journeys) and doing an analysis of the app and experience. They used these insights to run a future casting exercise for the chinese car share company. Kyle designed the research plan and also designed the future casting workshop. He worked with Hammond Stallings on this project. | Frog Design (Client confidential, but it was the biggest car share company at the time in China) |
| China | Men’s skin care | While Kyle was working for frog design in Shanghai, he worked on a project for a major french brand that was trying to learn about the trend of men’s skincare in China. | Frog Design (client is confidential) |
| Myanmar | Small business finance and consumer finance | Kyle led a UX team in Yoma Bank in Myanmar. As part of that, he worked on several research projects to understand how unbanked populations banked and he also coached several junior local designers on how to conduct research. | Yoma Bank |
Education
Kyle holds two degrees and a number of certifications:
Bachelors of Fine Arts in Design from the University of Kansas.
- 2011
- Emphasis in Industrial Design
- Kyle won the award as the distinguished designer for industrial design. Only one industrial designer in the whole school was awarded that title for that graduation year.
Study Abroad at the Folkwang Höchschule in Essen Germany.
- 2011
- Kyle studied industrial design for a semester at this school while he was an undergraduate.
- He worked on projects for Mercedes and Mars Petcare as well as projects in a futurist course.
- He won an award an 2,000 euros for his project for Mars pet care which was a treat dispense that clicked when you dispensed a small treat. The focus was on clicker training for dog owners (they could easily hold it in their hand, and every time they clicked for the dog’s good performance, they could reward the dog with a treat).
Master degree in Business (MBA)
- 2022
- University of Illinois
- Two focus areas:
- Global Strategy
- Business Analytics – including coding a BUNCH of stuff in R
Testimonials
Jonathan MacDonald’s Testimonial
Person:
Jonathan MacDonald
Background:
Jonathan is a software developer with over a decade of experience.
Relationship:
Jonathan and Kyle worked together at MedicSana. Jonathan was the CTO and Kyle was the CEO.
Testimonial:
I have had the pleasure of working with Kyle as a business partner in our startup endeavor at MedicSana, Inc. Kyle is a strategic thinker and has put hyper focus on truly understanding the market and customer needs to drive our business decisions at MedicSana forward.
With a UI/UX and industrial design background, Kyle understands that elegant technology solutions are constrained within the technical environment in which they are developed. He is a strong facilitator in conversations involving people of both technical and non-technical backgrounds, and strives to foster mutual understanding of the goals of the team. He is a Certified Scrum Master and a Certified Product Owner. He has an astute awareness of areas in his skill-set that can be honed, and if they can’t be bolstered by the superfluous amount of reading material he discovers on the topic, he finds ways to position himself in environments that allow him to grow professionally.
Kyle is the first person I reach-out to when trying to understand business problems. He is a respectable business partner, and I would not hesitate at the opportunity to work with him further.
Hammans Stalings’ Testimonial
Person:
Hammans Stalings
Background:
Hammans is a corporate strategist with a background in strategy, finance and qualitative design research as well as quantitative business research.
Relationship:
Hammans and kyle worked together twice. Once when they were both at frog Design’s Austin office from 2012 through 2015. Later they worked together at frog’s Shanghai office in 2018. They spent a lot of time together talking about business models and strategies, as well as the ways that design research and corporate strategy can synergize with one another.
Testimonial:
Among many other things, Kyle taught me the game of Go. It was never really a close match (I’m terrible at the game) but we always had such fantastic conversations that I didn’t mind. Kyle was one of the few designers that I ever had the honor to know who is an active reader of graduate level academic content. Because of this, he has an intuitive and applied grasp of Behavioral and Industrial Organizational economics. He can also speak to their core ideas and cases. It’s just not normal to get questions about transaction cost economics from interaction designers! Obviously that was a role that would not contain him long. So I wasn’t surprised when he founded MedicSana and moved to Mexico to grow it and the people who were lucky enough to have him as their leader.
Kyle is a true autodidact and continues to push my thinking as a strategist and design researcher. He’s passionate and genuine and I am jealous of the investor or team that gets to work with him next.
Aaron Moulton’s Testimonial
Person:
Aaron Moulton
Background:
Aaron is a designer.
Relationship:
Aaron was an Associate Creative director at Frog Design when Kyle worked with him.
Testimonial:
Kyle is a powerful energy to have in any team.
I worked with him on many projects at frog and considered him a key visionary to bring in to help shape projects and frame problems and would be very excited to work with him again in the future.
Be it working on financial services products or knowledge sharing tools Kyle is eager to dig into the space and is normally one step ahead of his team mates. He is also a skilled executor, able to carry those high level strategic conversations through, fulfilling on the powerful concepts in the details of a design. This ability to carry that visionary thread through is very difficult for most creatives who either get lost in the clouds of the vision or the maze of the details.
During ambiguous and tiring Design Research projects, Kyle proved to be a very empathetic designer who never lost sight of the customers voice through the process. He excelled in the field with challenging individual research participants and then managed to weave insightful paths through the data back in the studio.
Also, Kyle’s enthusiasm is hard to miss, you can see when something excites him as it is infectious, but an often overlooked part of his contribution is his willingness to improve junior team members working alongside him. He spent many hours, often on his own time, with new employees to mentor them to be stronger Interaction Designers or sit with other disciplines to learn how to speak their language.