Nate Marrs

Senior User Experience Designer

2021-Current

I was hired by KBR as a Senior User Experience Designer to work for a DoD software factory known as Space CAMP. This role has sharpened my UI skills and allowed me to delve deeper into UX Research. I have already worked on several products within Space CAMP. The environment has allowed me to work with different sized teams, budgets, processes, stakeholders and end-users, each with their own set of UX/UI challenges.

Responsibilities

Conduct user interviews to establish pain points, feature priority, and grow the team's domain knowledge
Facilitate usability tests to determine weak spots and miscommunications in the UI
Write surveys to receive quick feedback from higher quantities of users
Record findings and analyze UX Research results to affirm or reevaluate product roadmaps

Build/Rebuild design systems in Figma
Design high fidelity workflows for user stories
Create Figma clickable prototypes

Worked as a Balanced Team Lead (Design, Development, Project Management)
Contributed to product design teams of various sizes (1-5 designers)
Helped to facilitate process improvements on several product teams
Taught coworkers how to use Figma

Senior Product Designer

2018-2021

Senior Web Application Developer

2014-2018

Quality Assurance

2012-2014

CTA has helped me gain valuable experience across the whole software spectrum, and has allowed me to hone my craft in areas of personal interest.

The first step in my career was accepting a job at Computer Technology Associates as a Tester. This position taught me about the inner workings of the software development process, client satisfaction, and the balance between quality and time-to-market. After a couple years I was offered the opportunity to switch roles and become an ASP.NET developer for enterprise web applications. Several years later I transitioned to a UX/UI design role as processes evolved and there was a gap in that area. I left the company as a Senior Product Designer in November 2021, and am grateful for being able to explore multiple aspects of software development during my nearly 10 year employment with CTA.

Responsibilities

Providing solution approach options for client feature requests
Documenting solution specifications to translate conceptual design into developer-ready blueprints
Design and implement UI enhancements, style guidance documentation, and consistency standards
Facilitating cross-team meetings
- Design Consultation
- Product Direction Meetings
- Documentation Handoff Meetings
- Peer Reviews
Wireframing
High-Fidelity Rapid Prototyping

Develop data driven web pages for a complex system to adhere to client driven requirements
Collaborate with a multidisciplinary team using Agile methodologies
Assist with modernizing an aging technology stack from ASP.NET to MVVM with Vue.js and Entity Framework

Design, write, and implement test-cases
Develop Test Automation using C# and Visual Studio Web Services
Perform unit testing and ad-hoc testing

Co-Founder / CEO

2010-2015

Lead Game Developer

2010-2015

In college, we had Innovation/Entrepreneurship courses as part of our core cirriculum. One of the assignments was to come up with a product to compete for an NSF grant on green technologies. Being game development majors, our small group decided to apply with a novel educational game about personal carbon footprint and ways to be more sustainable at-home. We unfortunately did not win the grant, but the process of designing/developing games and the camaraderie we shared pushed us to continue the company for the next 5 years.

For the first time, I was able to be my own boss and run a team of highly talented individuals. We built three mobile games for Windows Mobile and Android as our primary coding language in school was C#. We released one of the games on iOS as well. Grayscale was a gravity bubble popping game with a slew of time-based and dexterity challenges. G-Day: Tower Defense was a pun-filled tower defense game with dozens of levels, fantastic art, and clever AI gnome enemies. With these two games we were able to be a featured vendor booth at the Winter X Games in Aspen.

Our last game RAD was a maze game utilizing the accelerometer of the phone as the primary input, where the user had to physically spin their phone to control a ball orbiting user-set centerpoints to navigate the mazes. It was a really cool concept, but sadly personal lives and new jobs interefered with its release, causing tensions in the team and ultimately I chose to shift my focus into another personal passion and current career: web development.

Responsibilities

Managed a growing multi-disciplinary team (artists, testers, sound designers, developers, etc)
Marketed payed mobile games in an ever increasingly freemium industry
Managed business operations (finances, scheduling, staffing, inventory, etc)
Developed and maintained the company website and social media
Ran a merchant account on Google Play, iOS App Store, and Windows Store
Applyed for grants and technical writing
Organized marketing events

Designed and refined three mobile games of varying complexities, scales, and categories
Developed mobile games in C# and Java with a small team
Tested games for quality, balance, value, cross-device compatibility, and replayability

Co-Founder / CTO

2015-2018

After GnomeSpray Games disbanded, my friend brought a proposition to me to build websites and web applications for local businesses. This is something that I had been working towards over the past few years and still have a genuine interest in. He had a client waiting at our doorstep ready to contract with us, so we took care of formalities and formed Fluxlogic Studios, LLC.

As I had experience through GnomeSpray, I ran the day-to-day business operations, and co-led an outsourced coding team to bring our first project to fruition. This is where I really started to learn about UX and how client wants and end-user needs don't always align. At both CTA and Fluxlogic during this time period I dove headfirst into the world of human-centerd empathy-driven design.

I also honed my HTML/CSS/JS skills as I built the company website and various internal tools to support the needs of the business. Eventually we shut the doors at Fluxlogic as well due to lack of free time, as both my partner and I were treating this as a side-gig.

Responsibilities

Managing an internationally outsourced team of developers to convey client requests and requirements
Managing business operations (finances, scheduling, client relations, etc)
Developing and maintaining the company website and social media
Writing contracts, proposals, and organization documentation

Design UX/UI for a multi-page web application in Drupal
Design and develop personal websites using Wordpress

3D Gaming R&D Internship

2010-2011

During my senior year at UCCS, I was offered an opportunity to intern for one of the biggest names in cinema, RealD 3D. They were spinning up an R&D division for gaming in the wake of 3D TVs and computer monitors started to grab market share.

My internship was focused on proof-of-concept and feasibility work with proprietary algorithms and hardware to see if the company could branch into that sector. It was an extremely rewarding experience. I learned a ton about behind-the-scenes development factories, maintaining a competitive edge in business, and drastically improved my coding capabilities.

These projects were focused on leading game engines (at the time) Windows XNA and Unreal Engine.

Responsibilities

Developed prototype for a proof-of-concept 3D operating system UI
Retrofitted an existing racing game to utilize 3D monitor capability with passive eyewear
Built demos in Unreal Engine to showcase proof-of-concepts for 3D gaming aquisition and licensing

Bachelor of Innovation

2007-2011

The Game Design and Development program was my entry into the world of software development. This unique (and brand-new) program was created as a cross-discipline between tech and entrepeneurship so students could learn how to start a business, or at the very least have a firm understanding of all the roles and stakeholder perspectives at play in a tech organization.

Classes were split equally between coding and business. The brainchild of this program Terry Boult, also created custom courses focusing on innovation and how to differentiate yourself in a crowded market. In one of these Innovation classes we even founded a company, GnomeSpray Games. The computer science classes were heavily geared towards game development (mainly C#), as a practical and fun way to teach software engineering. The instructions made perfect sense to my visual-heavy learning style, and it unveiled doors I never new existed to the world of front-end software design.

Some concepts came naturally to me, and some were harder to learn, but I've carried the lessons with me through my career thus far and will serve me for many more years to come.

Extracirricular Learning

UX/UI Design

Design Specification Writing
- I create UX documentation that translates to designers, developers, testers, and project managers with a meticulous attention to detail.
Information Architecture
- I craft interfaces that are easy to navigate and search, specializing in organizing complex data systems to seamlessly integrate with user's workflows.
Interaction Design
- I generate software experiences that create a connection between the user and the system, allowing them to communicate naturally with each other and work efficiently together to achieve goals.
Low & High Fidelity Mockups
- I develop visual solution representations to clearly communicate design intentions to users and developers.
Rapid Prototyping
- I build semi-functional replicas of solutions to express and test behaviorial characteristics of the design.
Requirements & User Stories
- I provide as much or as little documentation is needed to ensure product quality and to allow the full team to build empathy for a user's issue so that developers understand the desired outcome as well as the expected output of a feature.
Responsive Interfaces
- !!! TODO
User Research
- I uncover qualitative and quantitative data to discover pain points, validate hypothesis, and prioritize urgent user needs to ensure the team builds the right features at the right time.
Wireframing
- I create wireframes to nail down the conceptual notions of a design before large efforts are expended on "making it pretty".
Tools & Software
- Figma
- UXPin
- Balsamiq

Development

C# & ASP.NET
HTML5 / CSS3 / Javascript
jQuery
Vue.js
Java
SQL & MySQL
Tools & Software
- Visual Studio
- VS Code
- SQL Server Management Studio
- SourceTree / GitHub
- WalkMe
- Unity Game Engine
- Wordpress

Software Testing

Unit Testing
Integration Testing
Performance Testing
Usability Testing
Ad hoc Testing
Test Automation

Nate Marrs

Resume

Extracirricular Learning

UX/UI Design

Development

Software Testing