About
Professional summary
Senior UX Designer & User Research Strategist with 10+ years delivering intuitive, user-centered solutions across enterprise and consumer-facing platforms. Expert at simplifying complex systems through UX strategy, AI-human interaction, and scalable design systems. Proven track record of driving measurable gains in user engagement, product quality, and operational efficiency.
Experience
Microsoft | Azure, Cloud Experiences Studio | 05/26/2015 – 05/12/2025
Led strategy and execution of innovative UX solutions for observability and monitoring tools used by service owners, developers, DRIs, SREs, and DevOps professionals. Drove end-to-end experiences that reduced cognitive load, accelerated incident response, and improved decision-making in high-severity operational workflows. Simplified complex data through intuitive design patterns, empowering users to diagnose and resolve performance and availability issues faster and with greater confidence.
Highlights included:
Service Health (Brain Cloud Health Redesign)
Redesigned the Brain Cloud Health experience to help users find critical system insights faster, doubling monthly active users and increasing engagement by 173%. Partnered with Brain Product Managers, Developers, and User Researchers to validate new workflows that reduced Time to Mitigation (TTM) during incidents and outages.
Brain Auto-Diagnosis Configuration Wizard
Reduced setup friction and configuration time for Auto Diagnosis by designing a scalable, guided wizard that eliminates a complex manual support dependency, saving users time with reduced misconfiguration errors. Co-designed the configuration with Product Managers and Developers and quickly created Figma prototypes to gather quantitative data that informed the final model’s success.
AI & Automation Contributions
Designer Led Research / AI Plugin: Created a designer led research module that accelerated the ability to conduct post-usability study internal review discussions and assisted User Researchers in quickly gathering data on participant feedback. Partnered with a Developer to create an AI driven plugin that collates and summarizes notes taken in Figma, FigJam projects.
AI-driven insights pattern, Jarvis Service Health: Speeds up issue detection and resolution for Service Owners and DRIs, by providing a panel displaying the most important issues relevant to their Service, establishing a pattern utilized across several products.
Chaos Studio, Experiment Designer Permissions UX
Reduced experiment failures due to permissions by 91% by designing an automatic role assignment flow within the Experiment Designer. Led design updates and user testing of the permissions tab; 92% of experiments now use the built-in assignment, streamlining user onboarding and setup.
Application Insights: Application Map
Created an intuitive visual topology for distributed application systems—now a user-favorite for reducing signal noise and identifying APM issues. Partnered with Product Managers, Developers, and UX researchers to iterate on Figma prototypes using customer calls and feedback loops. Designed an interactive interface leveraging semantic zoom, filtering, and on-demand insights to quickly surface crucial data.
Application insights: Performance / Failures / Availability Views
Enabled Azure customers to solve application issues 4X faster, leading to 6X usage growth over 24m. Designed insights-tailored, curated APM experiences that streamline detect/triage/diagnose journeys and reduced reliance on complex log analytics. Worked with Product Managers, Developers and User Research to create an innovative, cross-referenced UX that became an essential tool for application triage workflows in Azure.
Application insights: End to End Transactions
Enabled DevOps engineers to quickly diagnose slow or failing transactions with a Gantt chart “hot path” view that pinpointed issues in code vs. external dependencies. Collaborated with Product Manager and Developers to create and test a Figma prototype that validated user needs of maximized Gantt view space, streamlined access to traces and exceptions, surfaced key transaction details, and linked to additional diagnostic tools.
Azure Monitor: Overview page
Over 900% increase in usage of video tutorials by Azure Monitor users, within 3 months of launch, with an additional 20% uptick in usage across Application, VM and Container insights services over 6 months. Worked closely with Product Manager, User Researchers and developers to quickly design, validate and deploy the feature, using Figma prototypes for rapid iteration and validation.
Azure Operational Intelligence / Operation Management Suite
Improved operational visibility and issue detection in Azure and System Center by designing UX workflows and data visualizations for the Operations Management Suite. Created end-to-end designs—including wireframes, redlines, and prototypes—for key features like Partial Search Results, Intelligence Packs, the Solutions Gallery, and Azure V1 integration.
Microsoft Hardware UX Design Group (Contract via Allovus): (06/2012 - 05/26/2015)
Accelerated approval for next-gen Microsoft Hardware concepts, including Microsoft’s Surface tablets, by delivering high-fidelity UX prototypes using Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects, supporting product development in a fast-paced dev cycle.
Designed the full interaction and visual experience for the LifeCam Dashboard app for Windows, enabling users to instantly confirm webcam status via live video within a modern, flat UI.
Microsoft Small Business Group (SBG): Project Siena (05/2009 - 06/2012)
Visual / Interaction / Brand Identity Designer:
Drove adoption and visibility for Avatar Kinect, the most-used app in Xbox Fun Labs, by delivering end-to-end visual and interaction design, brand development, wireframes, redlines, and motion design, plus implementation of front-end scene assets.
Drove adoption of next-gen Augmented Reality concepts for the Microsoft’s V1 HoloLens device.
Microsoft ACES Studio: Microsoft Flight Simulator 11, Microsoft Train Simulator 2 (11/15/2004 - 05/2009)
Visual / Interaction / Brand Identity Designer:
Improved UI across Microsoft Flight and Train Simulator titles with visual designs that balanced depth for enthusiasts and ease of use for new users, confirmed through usability testing. Saved development team time and money by creating all front-end UI assets using a proprietary UX development pipeline.
Established Train Simulator branding used in marketing, merchandising and events.
SKILLS & TOOLS
Methods: User-Centered Design Thinking (Hypothesis Progression Framework), Agile/Scrum, Lean UX, WCAG Accessibility.
Design: Wire-framing, Prototyping, Interaction Design, Visual/UI Design, User Flows, designing Large Language Model (LLMs) integration, AI Plugin Design.
Research: User Interviews, Usability Testing, A/B Testing, Heuristic Evaluation, Quantitative & Qualitative Analysis
Tools: Figma, FigJam, Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, PowerPoint, Microsoft Word.
EDUCATION
Academy of Art University, San Francisco, CA: BFA program in Illustration, minor in Graphic Design.
Personal
When I’m not nerding out on UX patterns and product strategy, you’ll probably find me hunting down high quality wines to share with friends. I co-created Decanted Podcast to spotlight my favorite bottles and stories from the wine world—and yes, I’m WSET Level 2 certified, so I can totally recommend what pairs best with barbecued potato chips (spoiler: it's rosé, always rosé).
Recommendations
“What sets Dave apart is his unwavering focus on the customer. He doesn’t just design interfaces—he designs experiences that solve real problems. I’ve seen him advocate for users in high-stakes conversations, lead usability studies that shaped product direction, and deliver design solutions that made our products measurably better.”
“ Dave brought tremendous value to the team through his deep expertise in design systems and data visualization, which was instrumental in shaping complex cloud health aggregation UX...
...Dave is highly detail-oriented, from deriving insights to executing implementation, and is deeply engaged in user research. He consistently supported our research efforts with note-taking, analysis, and planning, ensuring our designs were grounded in real user needs.”
“I started as an apprentice and I had the fortune to have Dave as my mentor. During this time Dave believed in me, made me feel included in the team from day one, guided me to navigate Microsoft’s ecosystem, helped me understand Azure’s design system extension, gave me directional feedback on Information Architecture, Interaction patterns and Design-led research. His mentorship was pivotal to have a successful apprenticeship and being offered an interview loop as an FTE in the team. ”
“I worked with Dave as the software engineer on the Application Insights Application Map feature. Dave is an incredible designer with an eye for detail and a good instinct for usability. We formed a beautiful partnership of engineering and design and Dave’s designs led the way to develop a feature that was very sleek and pleasurable to interact with”
