Mike Niebling Email & Phone Number

Chicago, Il, Us

In this role I spend most of my time on strategic technology problems like:* How can we incrementally refactor our monolithic legacy app without losing velocity?* How can we make any Mediafly app have a unified user experience, regardless of which team built it?* How can we improve our velocity and reduce our support ticket rate?* How can we provide a delightful and productive developer experience for these initiatives?I still spend about 25% of my time writing code, but it's less feature work these days and much more focus on tasks that improve our tooling or help increase the leverage of the engineers on the team.

Chicago, Il

As a principal engineer, I didn't get the time to do much UX work any more but I did focus primarily on larger-scale frontend challenges, like:* A transition of our frontend codebase to React micro-frontends.* Technical architecture for the frontend of a new workflow editing application.* Leading a re-write of one of our oldest and buggiest UI features.* Improving the speed and reliability of our automated testing.I also tried to find the sweet spot of "boring technology, but not too boring"—I didn't want our tooling and patterns to become outdated, but also didn't want us to live out on the bleeding edge.I really enjoyed this role but I was tapped to fill a vacancy at the director level and thought it would be a good challenge to focus even more on people, strategy & process.

In this role, I led the frontend implementation of some large features, like:* Our homegrown analytics application, with custom data visualizations built on React & Highcharts* An advanced search query builder UI, using a parser generator and dynamic form* A document builder app that allowed users to combine pages from different docsI also spent time improving our developer tooling, working with the UX team to maintain our component/UI theme library, and helping spearhead a TypeScript migration. I didn't do full-time design work in this position anymore but did find the chance to dip into Sketch every now and then for one-offs.

This was a cool hybrid UX design & frontend engineering role. I split my time about 70/30 between technical work and design work. My favorite design project during this time was a blank-slate redesign of our iOS app. On the code side, I spent a lot of time doing UI feature development and coming up to speed on our developer tooling & shared frontend libraries.

Chicago, Il

I came on board as the first UX designer at Sonoma to help build out a new Enterprise Mobility & User-Centered Design practice. We did native apps on iOS and Windows 8 as well as cross-platform mobile and traditional web applications. Here are some cool things I was able to design:+ A native Windows 8 touch application to help Special Forces commanders avoid burning out their soldiers by making visual sense out of deployment data.+ An iPad application for pharmaceutical reps to carry with them on the road, replacing tons of physical folders and printed reports.+ A tablet application for New Belgium Beer Rangers to simplify their customer visits.+ A web UI for phone agents to quickly schedule appointments into open timeslots.+ A web app to keep track of Cricket scores after our dartboard broke.

Greater Chicago Area

+ I was the original design lead for the company's first mobile app, released on both iOS and Blackberry.+ I maintained our design documentation process, changing it once from MS Word (!) to beautiful InDesign artifacts, then again to a wiki system two years later.+ I built functional HTML/JS prototypes for usability testing, as well as a few small internal apps using HTML, Flash, and C# (ASP.NET MVC).+ I was the lead designer for one of the first two applications for our entirely new app platform.

Greater Chicago Area

+ I worked as an one of 3 interaction designers on an agile software development team, creating wireframes and detailed documentation for a web-based CRM module.+ I took a week off of this project to help on a large-scale comparative usability test for a set of mobile devices.

Greater Chicago Area

+ I worked on many different types of projects, including remote testing, eye tracking, mobile device testing, and large-scale usability tests.+ I was involved with 240-plus participant sessions, including over 48 hours of one-on-one session moderation.+ I led the U.S. leg of a global research project for an international sports body.+ I was 2nd author on a paper that got conference accepted and has since received a few citations.

Reviewed and discussed current literature, designed an experiment in information navigation and created instruments to administer the experiment.

Mentored a group of first-year resident assistants, planned and implemented staff training programs, developed and implemented a student-run hiring process, administered a group of 40 residents, created programming for both residents and staff.

M.S., Human-Computer Interaction

Graduated with distinction. Elective focus on psychological factors.

B.S., Information Science & Technology

Minors in Writing and Business & Management Systems.