Ben Brasso Email & Phone Number

HCD/R Lead, Digital Health Experience (DHx/p), Ambient Scribe, Digital Health Office (DHO) for US Department of Veteran Affairs- HCD/R team lead for for AI pilots, telehealth programs, and emerging technologies for ambulatory care: I evaluate and determine if AI tools and emerging technologies can assist with reducing provider burnout and improve clinician work flows by reducing their administrative burden while improving the Veteran experience; enabling providers to focus on outcomes and care encounters versus time spent inputting information into multiple internal tools, e.g., electronic health records (EHRs), etc. With a talented UX team of researchers and designers and collaboration with product specialists (and partnering with offices and programs within and adjacent to the DHO), I use human-centered design (HCD) principles to bring users, empathy, and safety into iterative product and service design with multi-disciplinary contributors and leadership to uncover and relieve administrative burden and gaps and create repeatable frameworks for using HCD principles to solve clinical administrative challenges.

UX Lead, Unified Appointment Experience, OCTO, US Department of Veteran Affairs- I help Veterans manage their health care online by modernizing (and reducing staff time on) scheduling appointments, pre-registration, check in, after-visit summaries, and travel reimbursement for VA and community care appointments by applying human-centered design, research, UX/UI design with VA & USW DS, and data analysis (GA 4, DataDog, impact vs. feasibility matrixes, etc.).- Veteran and staff-facing research: I plan, conduct, synthesize, contribute implications to VA Design System and research repo, and share findings from research studies—including research with disabled Veterans and AT users—with colleagues, VA POs and the broader VA design practice using mixed method research, card sorts, moderated usability studies, semi-structured interviews, in-person UAT, etc.- Create UX/UI artifacts: I create UX artifacts that socialize human needs, identify gaps and opportunities, and conceptualize digital experiences that address those needs. This includes creating journey maps, userflows, service blueprints, prototypes, UI mockups using VA Design System and contributing back to the design community with new components and patterns, writing plain language content and call to actions, and annotating designs for accessibility. - Lead team of researchers, UX/UI designers, and content strategists: I move business challenges from ideas, to research, to digital experiences with a talented UX team by sprint planning with DMs, lead design spikes and creating implementation tickets, creating a “we” team culture, practice providing and receiving great design feedback, encouraging co-working, creating research findings and actionable insights together, validating design work, encourage sharing of design work with non-UX colleagues and VA POs, and documenting repeatable processes, such as story pointing, structuring design files, creating a11y annotations, updating research repos, etc.

Ellicott City, Maryland, United States

- Creating a vision: I was responsible for shaping the strategy of a hospital’s or health system’s website during a redesign and CMS development initiative, among other digital experiences. This included two components: discovery (e.g., stakeholder interviews, surveys, user testing, competitor reviews, etc.) and strategy development, which documented goals, recommendations, feature set and measures of success. - Manage scale and client expectations: At the onset of a project, my role was to ensure the scale of internal processes, breadth of deliverables and site functionality matched the budget, while also ensuring the framework of the solution was built to scale with the organization over time. - Research and analysis: Clients asked strategic questions all the time. E.g., “How do we add online scheduling?” No matter the size or scale of the question, I helped develop recommendations, along with the data to support it, for bringing their business needs to life. - Creating UX/UI artifacts: I was responsible for creating artifacts to build consensus and understanding from clients before web development could begin. This included navigation, feature set maps, design template lists, functional specs, wireframes, etc. - Manage Strategy & UX Team and deliverables: I supervised and directed assignments for writers, content strategists, digital strategists, UX designers and freelancers. This included directly managing or overseeing the strategy, UX and writing deliverables for over 30 clients. - Collaborating and providing UX direction across the agency: Through the creation of briefs and participating in meetings, I worked with web developers to understand feasibility of ideas and their impact on scope, web designers to align on design and project managers to set or understand client expectations. - Executive leadership: As a member of the agency’s leadership team, I was responsible for agency staffing, strategic account planning and business development.

Baltimore, Maryland, United States

R2Integrated is a digital experience agency that creates digital solutions to connect customers with brands. R2Integrated builds digital solutions for healthcare, higher education, consumer and nonprofit organizations on the Adobe Experience Cloud platform. I led discovery and strategy development for website redesign and CMS development engagements with Loyola University Maryland, Boston College and American Public University, among others. I also created supportive UI/UX artifacts for numerous web projects, including information architecture, sitemaps, navigations, usability studies, user flows, personas and wireframes. Working closely with project managers, I ensured those artifacts were vetted and understood by clients and internal team members (e.g., UX and web designers, front-end developers, back-end developers, etc.).

Rockville, Maryland, United States

HZDG is an integrated creative agency specializing in branding, advertising and digital solutions with offices in MD, DC and NY. I helped introduce UX as a process for web design projects at the agency, where we used various UX methodologies and user research to uncover insights, opportunities and inform web design and content strategies. I created visual UI/UX artifacts to supplement web design strategies, including user flows, content inventories, sitemaps, wireframes and conceptual prototypes to gain buy-in on proposed UX and overall web design direction. I worked with a variety of industries and clients, including Canopy by Hilton, Newseum, Top of the Rock NYC, King Arthur Flour and University of Maryland Global Campus.

Sparks Glencoe, Maryland, United States

- Core production manager for digital experiences: I produced and managed the execution of microsites, enterprise-level websites, landing pages, newsrooms and Facebook page applications, among other digital experiences, for targeted marketing communication campaigns. I took projects from concept to completion with nimbleness and thoroughness. This consisted primarily of two disciplines: creating UI/UX documents to communicate the digital experience (e.g., content inventories, information architecture, navigation, functional and CMS requirements, etc.) and collaborating with account managers, designers and web developers to ensure quality and accuracy (e.g., providing design feedback, progress updates and bug tickets). - Report digital campaign successes: I oversaw implementation of digital ad tracking, web experience engagement and optimization. To do this successfully, I created cross-channel touchpoint maps to visualize user journeys, set up tagging for advertising channels to track individual ad performance and tagged the digital experience to see engagement with content and conversion using Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. Through the creation of reports with supplemental analysis, account managers were able to view brand engagement metrics and optimize media for higher conversion rates. - Create UX artifacts: As my interest in UX methodologies and user-centered design began to grow in 2010, I started creating visuals to communicate how users interact with existing digital experiences and/or how we think they’ll use new ones. I did this by creating experiential user flows, analytics funnel reports, wireframes and conceptual prototypes.

My role as a project manager was to ensure that web projects were completed on time and on budget, while ensuring a client’s expectations and vision were being met or exceeded. I accomplished this through producing project status reports and sharing them in meetings with clients, coordinating project tasks and priorities with internal account managers, web designers and web developers and producing contingency and mitigation plans to share with clients and internal project sponsors.

Baltimore, Maryland, United States

MDV Communications, located in Baltimore, MD, was a marketing communications agency that provided search engine marketing and online marketing services. MDV Communications was acquired by IMRE in 2007. As an agency of four, I did front-end development within a blog and search engine syndication platform, wrote and published blog content and managed search engine marketing and search engine optimization campaigns.