About Me
Hello 👋
I’m Benjamin Ellis, a UX Manager, Design System evangelist, and creative photographer out of the creative mountain town of Asheville, NC.
The skills, projects and practices I’ve been able to develop over my career have influenced the way I approach complex product design challenges, collaborate with leaders and contributors in other disciplines, and mentor team members in both their technical development and soft skills required for today’s remote working environment.
My career has been exciting and dynamic spanning multiple roles, industries, and locations around the world. This is a deep dive into my experiences, what I learned, and how I adapted those skills to new roles throughout my career.
The more traditional TL:DR version of my experiences can still be found on my resume page here.
Starting my career
(2010 - 2015)
I started my career at The DiSTI Corporation after graduating with honors from the University of Central Florida’s top rated Computer Science program. Most people associate Orlando with theme parks and sunshine vacations with little knowledge that the 2nd largest industry in the area is in the realm of Military Simulation and Training. This is where I initially cut my teeth in my career developing a design product, GL Studio, that operates similar to Figma and Sketch but comes with an additional capability of generating Open GL C++ code to rapidly create new user experiences.
I traveled around the world assisting customers to integrate this tool into their workflow for complex systems such as multi-million dollar flight simulators, certifiable embedded displays for aircraft (DO-178B), medical (510k), automotive (ISO 26262), as well as a variety of complex embedded and desktop command and control systems for everything from consumer products to drone operation flight displays.
Being a small company I participated in a wide range of roles outside of my background in software development. I sold over $500,000 in design tools to various industries and groups worldwide with a specific focus in growing the organization’s automotive capability and lead business development for multiple multi-million dollar virtual maintenance training programs for the US ARMY, US NAVY, US Air National Guard, and the Chillean Air Force.
https://disti.com/market-solutions/aviation/
One of my mentors in the organization left me with a quote that I’ve carried on throughout my entire career, “You only need to be one day ahead of the class.” This radically altered my approach to assisting client teams whenever I woke up in far corners of the world to tackle some of the world’s most difficult product challenges. Often, complex product development challenges come down to small incremental day to day steps and the flexibility to continually reevaluate approach with other team members.
Leading a team to design new automotive experiences
(2015 - 2017)
One of my largest customers while working at The DiSTI Corporation was the boutique automaker, Jaguar Land Rover. I provided technical demos, and custom integrations to the team in the early 2010’s while they evaluated over 20 different HMI tools and selected GL Studio as their tool of choice for their future vehicle programs.
After their selection of the tool I traveled to Bangalore India to set up their production team, at the time 7 engineers, and supported their program over the next two years as the team grew to over 150+ contributors and released a new home built infotainment system (Next Generation Infotainment, NGI) for the Jaguar XJ in 2016.
As that vehicle line program was beginning it’s roll off the assembly line, I was recruited by Jaguar Land Rover to lead a team of designers and developers at a new research and development facility in Portland Oregon that would have a dual track focus of re-imagining infotainment systems for future vehicles and serving as an incubator program for technology startups on the west coast.
Transitioning my contributions from software development to a focus in user experience design was completely transformational in my career. Here I learned new skills in design thinking, user research, and the iterative design process. I lead a multi-disciplinary team to gather requirements, redesign, user test, and deploy a completely new interaction model for future Jaguar Land Rover vehicles both with internal team members and a variety of partner organizations. This component based from the ground up redesign was my first introduction to what we now have a common term in the industry, design systems.
We called this effort UX2020, if only we knew how that name would take on a radically different meaning in the not to distant future, I lead what we would now call a design system team, that focused on the technical capability of the system and common design patterns while rapidly prototyping and user testing individual components as well as complex product experiences.
To assist in our product design and definition I also coordinated with the local Pacific Coast Rover Club (PCRC) to recruit owners for user tests, brought in owner vehicle examples for employee demos, and coordinated weekend fun runs for employees to gain a better experience of the vehicles and services they were designing for. This club is one of the oldest Land Rover clubs in America spanning across Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, and after a year of working with the organization I was voted into a seat on the board of the club.
In addition to leading the design system team, I also lead the writing of RFIs and RFPs for 6 key areas of the infotainment system to leverage the contribution of partner organizations that consisted of a translation service partner, media player services, GPS mapping and route services, hardware processor vendors, an embedded operating system, and a Tier 1 service provider.
This successful effort culminated with the release of this new infotainment system (PIVI) to Jaguar Land Rover’s most valued vehicle property, the Defender, with critical acclaim and praise across the industry.
https://www.autoblog.com/2021/08/06/pivi-pro-jlr-infotainment-review/
Designing the future of travel
(2017 - 2018)
While I was working at Jaguar Land Rover, the leader of the Portland JLR R&D office, Matt Jones (currently Executive Director at Ford Motor Company), joined the innovative startup Virgin Hyperloop and created a new UX Management role within the organization for me to join and help iterate the future of transportation.
This was an exciting challenge for me to join a team of some of the smartest engineers on the planet to introduce a user centered design approach to the immensely complex transportation system they were developing in Los Angeles and testing at a facility in Las Vegas. Being a team of one, I quickly performed an audit of the command and control system, testing road map, and potential customer deployment sites to craft an RFI and RFP for an external design agency to assist my efforts quickly.
I evaluated, selected, and onboard an design agency with a focus of creating a new design system for the command and control system for the remote test site in Las Vegas that was launching prototype pods in a vacuum system, the first of its kind in the world. While I directed that team, I was continually hosting design thinking work shops, gathering updated system requirements, and developing collateral to assist the business development team working with potential deployment nation states.
As part of that development, I coordinated a demonstration of the system capability with a mapping service provider, HERE Technologies, to show the potential of a high speed multi-modal transportation network using some of their latest map guiding and route finding services. Part of that effort was working with their marketing team to develop a CES demonstration for 2018 that culminated in a prototype app and our prototype transportation pod on the front-door of the worlds largest technology showcase.
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/virgin-hyperloop-one-rockets-toward-reality-at-ces-2018/
After our CES demonstration, Virgin Hyperloop set out a new ambition for the company to reconvert the test facility out in Las Vegas to perform the first human rideable hyperloop test flight. As the first part of achieving this goal I coordinated a blended design thinking workshop and test facility retrospective for over 120 employees that spanned across the entire organization to capture insights, wins, challenges, and detriments of the test program up until the current point in time. For two days I guided employees to share knowledge and work together to form group together key initiatives that were needed to achieve the first human rideable flight and aligned these focus areas to directors that would be champions of change within their respective areas.
For 6 months I coordinated monthly workshops and updates across our 6 focus areas and provided company wide updates to progress made. Having up to date knowledge across the organization helped me coordinate my design agency partner to develop a design system and feature designs for the command and control system building up to the first human test flight.
Unfortunately, I was caught in a layoff at the end of 2018 that affected more than half of the engineering organization, but my initiatives continued on and lead to the first successful test flight of a human ridable hyperloop system in 2020.
Finding my own creative voice during a global pandemic
(2019 - 2021)
Looking back on this time, I am so grateful that I had an opportunity to take a pause from my technical career to explore my own creative process, what I hold of value, and how I move through life. I initially took a few months in various short term strategy contracting positions at startups to develop strategic roadmaps but ultimately decided to lean into my passion for photography during this period.
I had no idea where this road would lead, and could have never anticipated that it would coincide with a global pandemic. It was so refreshing to refocus my experience in design and business development on such a direct personal scale. I moved down to Pensacola, FL to be closer to family and quickly established a practice to use photography to develop creative brand strategies for local small business.
In 2020 during the George Floyd protests, I donated my time to a local grassroots movement to document the direct actions taking place in the area and coordinated my efforts with local social justice leaders in the area spanning multiple organizations. After a few days I quickly stood up a site that was updated every night as a means of gathering support throughout the community to assist in developing a local movement that successfully removed confederate monuments, established a police oversight and accountability board, and paved the way for local organizational leaders to have participation in local, regional, and state wide efforts.
From that experience I assisted my friend, Jamil Davis, as he moved up the Black Voters Matter organization to become the Florida coordinator. I helped him develop a brand and identity of the organization through photography of organizational leaders, smaller movements, and social media campaigns the lead all the way to the doorstep of the state capital.
At the start of 2021 I wanted to dive further into my own creative process to see just how far I could take myself into the unknown. Without a clear direction I challenged myself to document my own explorations on a weekly basis as a way to find patterns, see how my thoughts changed over time, and bring my friends along my own creative discovery process. Each week I could not only see how my art changed, but also how my perspective adjusted overtime for my own creativity and how I applied it.
https://satoristori.substack.com/
After three months I could see where this exploration into the unknown was gently guiding me. I found that I was less focused on the resulting images and artwork and more interested observing and adjusting how I would develop and navigate holistic creative experiences with others. Looking back on this time period the answer seems so simple that a user experience manger would ultimately re-discover his passion for enabling and developing his own creative process for himself and others, but sometimes life provides a more beautiful and windy road to get to your final destination. With a change in how work was getting done in the UX industry, opening up opportunity for more remote work, I figured it was time to take what I learned during this period to properly blend my creative passion and my technical career experience.
Leading and guiding a creative agency after acquisition
(2021 - present)
Shortly after looking for new roles I was hired to manage a UX design team for a Chicago based creative digital agency, One North, that was recently acquired by the larger consulting and staffing organization, TEK Systems. This creative agency inherited a 5 person UX team that were contracted into individual client organizations, and my first goal was to architect and sell new multi-disciplinary agency driven design work to begin rolling team members out of their individual contributor roles to a more creative and supportive creative agency environment.
To begin this effort I coordinated across the business to develop an organizational focus around design systems and design operation consulting with a particular focus on multi-discipline collaboration. Taking my previous work experience, I was able to educate team members in how to perform this complex work, create new sales collateral, and solution new initiatives at over ten organizations for my team members to participate in across various industries such as healthcare, insurance, financial planning, streaming media, airline transportation, energy utilities, and vehicle manufacturing.
Below is my perspective and approach to this highly complex work.
https://www.onenorth.com/insights/design-systems-unleashed-transforming-challenges-into-innovation/
Over the course of two years I’ve grown the initial team from a size of 5 to a contributing team of over 10 by promoting and cross training team members from other disciplines, recruiting and hiring full time contributors, and building a pool of contributors in a freelance network to adjust per project velocity.
It has been a rewarding experience being trusted from a number of UX design managers and directors across various industries to offer recommendations and guidance on how to perform this work that I have been involved with both from a technical and design perspective for over a decade. The breadth of experiences have given me unique insights into how individual organizations and our collective discipline are overcoming some of the largest challenges and at the same time how much it comes down to the specific people doing the work itself.
Building and growing this UX team along with the contributors that comprise it has been one of my favorite accomplishments to date.
Up next, I’m guiding the team to work alongside our partners in Data Strategy to make products that are more based on quantitative data. ✌️