Alexander McIlwraith
Curriculum Vitae
Summary
User-centred and detail-oriented Senior UX Designer with 10+ years of experience specializing in design systems, and omnichannel, unified customer experiences.
Technical Skills: Figma, Balsamiq Mockups, JavaScript, CSS, PHP, MySQL, HTML, accessibility
Experience
Web Communications Consultant / Senior Product Designer
January 2013 – Present, Agricorp, Canada
Responsibilities
- Lead the design strategy, market research, and implementation of end-to-end user experiences for complex, high-traffic web platforms, ensuring alignment with both business and customer goals. Focused on delivering impactful and intuitive web experiences that drive feature adoption, engagement, and retention.
- Collaborate closely with engineers, and cross-functional teams to transform business challenges and product hypotheses into clear, actionable customer problems, defining design solutions that maximize impact and meet user needs.
- Develop comprehensive wireframes, prototypes, and interaction designs, ensuring the visual and functional quality of web-based features. Use a user-centric approach to iterative design, with attention to both visual design and intuitive usability.
- Conduct user research (qualitative and quantitative) to inform design decisions, including usability testing, journey mapping, and analytics reporting to guide the evolution of the customer experience throughout the product lifecycle.
- Spearhead the development and maintenance of design systems, ensuring consistent and accessible design standards across over 7,500 public-facing web pages, and lead a team to uphold web standards and optimize user flows.
Results
- Spearheaded strategic UX design efforts for critical web platforms, including B2B and internal-facing systems, enhancing user experience for 50,000+ external clients and driving a 20% increase in conversions by improving functionality and simplifying interaction processes.
- Drove product and feature evolution through continuous iteration based on customer feedback, aligning user needs with business objectives to successfully launch product features with measurable impact on user satisfaction and retention.
- Championed the creation of a company-wide design thinking community, mentoring over 500 staff members to foster a collaborative, innovative environment. This helped scale the UX maturity of the organization and streamlined product development in an Agile environment.
- Optimized usability and accessibility across digital touchpoints, leading to a 75% reduction in mandatory form fields and achieving 86% user satisfaction, enhancing the overall product experience in high-stakes, fast-paced projects.
- Refined intranet design to boost information architecture and usability, introducing key features like search functionality to significantly improve site navigation and productivity for internal stakeholders.
Digital Communications Lead, Department of Psychology
November 2004 – January 2013, University of Guelph, Canada
Responsibilities
- Lead web technology change, including providing training and support to guide staff through complex organizational digital transformation.
- Manage servers to support a production web environment including content management system (CMS), web applications and research project data collection systems.
Results
- Introduce a content management system, providing web design coaching, documentation and video training, to allow 30 faculty to communicate research areas, leading to an increase in enrolment figures.
- Mentor 120+ researchers in survey and project UI design, assisting them to create custom research collection solutions, building UI to enable research participants to provide information in a consistent manner and allow accurate data analysis.
- Software development, UX design and user testing for custom resource management application using PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and CSS, allowing 150 faculty, staff and graduate students to efficiently request department resources on a common system.
Change Analyst, Central Computing (CCS) (Secondment 2006–2009)
Responsibilities
- Manage the transition of a campus-wide software distribution service from an analyst-supported to call centre-supported model.
- Facilitate professional development training for software products, including campus-wide workshops for 1,500+ staff demonstrating excellent verbal communication skills, leading and demonstrating the ability to collaborate with internal and external trainers.
Results
- Author 100+ procedures and support documents to guide a small team through change and facilitate transition of support calls to call centre staff.
- Coach staff to decrease support response times and maintain escalations despite a 50% increase in support requests, while ensuring all orders are processed within 24 hours of receipt.
Digital Consultant (freelance contract)
May 2004 – August 2005, Flavours of Canada, Canada
Responsibilities
- Develop a culture of engagement by coaching and providing feedback to mentor partner agency staff to engage visitors, using an authentic, honest tone of voice, who interacted with the site.
Results
- Designing digital experience, delivering and supporting online presence, copywriting and digital strategy and testing for a national campaign, attracting than 2,000+ registrations from across Canada during the annual campaign.
Education
- 2025 Bachelor of Professional Arts Communications Studies, Athabasca University, Canada
Courses in corporate communications, media relations, digital communications, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and leadership - 2024 UX Master Certificate (Certification ID #1004329), Nielsen Norman Group, United States
- 2021 UX Certificate (Certification ID #1004329), Nielsen Norman Group, United States
UX Research and UX Management Specialty - 2015 Certificate in Business Communications, University of Waterloo, Canada
- 2002 Bachelor of Arts, University of Guelph, Canada
Volunteering and Advisory Roles
- Programme Director, Alpha Central Church, Cambridge, Canada, June 2016 - Present
Executed outreach programme supervising a team of 20 volunteers, responsible for all aspects of programme leadership programme administration. - Director of Communications, Clan Donald, September 2013 - August 2018
Developed and maintained communications strategy, resources, and web presence for chapter of around 100 members, including display materials used at 10+ events annually. - Web Advisor, Central Church, Cambridge, Canada, January 2003 - Present
Visioning for web presence, content strategy and information architecture including weekly podcast attracting visitors and worldwide donations. - Advisor, IABC, Canada, October 2011 - September 2013
Designed communications strategy for event expansion, solved technical issues for web and social media integration, ensuring 100% uptime and easy usability.