Hello!

Photo of Corey Stone

I'm Corey, a full-stack Lead Product Designer with 27 years' experience making the complex seem simple, and the inefficient feel seamless. I'm flexible with process, but in general, I:


  • Empathize
    via user
    research.

  • Ideate
    with sketches & prototypes.

  • Evaluate
    by A-B or usability testing.

  • Iterate
    until it's awesome.

I'm also a zero-to-1 thinker with experience at multiple startups, plus founding ~10 iOS apps & web services, doing all the product strategy, research, IA, UX, UI & visual design, testing, dev/time/budget decisions, writing, marketing, and branding myself. See my work below, or grab my résumé if you need it. Thanks!

A screenshot, flow map, and persona from my work at SchooLinks.

SchooLinks: EdTech SaaS Startup

As a senior designer on a design team of 3 at the fast-paced startup, I design new features, improve existing ones, and help increase our UX maturity.

View SchooLinks Case Study
Screenshots of the clinician UI and responsive patient UI for a mental health-tracking SaaS application.

Owl: Mental-health-tracking SaaS Startup

As the sole UX Designer on a small product team, I designed new features, analytics dashboards, and high-fi interactive mockups of future concepts that helped secure $15M in Series B funding.

View Owl Case Study
Personas, user flows, and task / user analysis from ACT Test Registration project.

Reinvented ACT Test Registration & Portal

MyACT is ACT.org's responsive e-Commerce portal where ~3 million students/year register for the US and Non-US ACT tests, view scores, and explore careers, colleges, and majors. The result? Task time decreased from 35 to 7 minutes, great user feedback, and revenue-per-registrant expected to increase.

View ACT Case Study

Related: ACT Design System

Screenshots of FullOut on various devices.

Founding FullOut (pre-launch)

For my current side project (with a dev partner), I do all the product vision, strategy, and design for the hybrid React-based SaaS that streamlines the messy multi-person process of creating, collaborating on, and teaching a cheer or dance routine. It'll also include a 3-sided marketplace and other helpful tools.

HERO Keyboard for iOS.

Founded HERO Keyboard

HERO is an iOS app that I conceived, designed, marketed, and managed contract developers to build. In English, just 9 letters are used 80% of the time, so my patented design makes them bigger and centered where your thumb likes to be. The result? Finger travel is reduced by 35%, or "3 feet per tweet."

View HERO Case Study
Enterprise dashboard concept.

User Research & Redesign of Enterprise SaaS & Dashboard

As the UX Specialist for a global multi-office civil engineering firm from 2013-2016, I researched and designed internal enterprise SaaS web apps, native tablet apps, and legacy systems that increased efficiency, productivity, and profits.

View Kleinfelder Case Study
MixPlay iOS app.

Founded MixPlay App

Another 'scratch my own itch' iOS app that I founded, designed, marketed, and managed the contract development. Built in 2015, it's still used and loved by many coaches, making steady sales with no advertising.

View MixPlay Case Study
KU.edu web presence.

Leading the KU.edu Web Presence

I led the 2012 redesign of the million-page KU.edu web presence into a new responsive Drupal-based CMS, plus designing the home page, top-level pages, unit templates, and award-winning Admissions site.

View KU.edu Case Study
Soccer training app concept updates.

Soccer Training App

For the soccer training app that my kid's ODP team uses, I had some behavioral design ideas on how to increase player motivation and engagement through goal-setting, self-assessment, plan authoring, tracking, and reminders, so I mocked them up and presented them to the app owner. She loved the designs and added some of the functionality!

View Figma Prototype
Medication-prescribing mockup

Medical SaaS Navigation & Med-Prescribing Flow

From 2004-2006, I designed various UI's for a major medical software company, solving complex interaction and data-display problems for use in environments that demand efficient error-free workflow.

View Healthcare Case Study
Stop the Groomer screenshot

Co-founded an Abuse-prevention App

My kids' gymnastics gym owner wanted to educate kids on reducing their risk of being sexually abused. We got written content from a family therapist, which I gamified, designed, and art directed into a free kid-friendly game-like app.

View Marketing Site

Created an iOS/Android game

In 2016, I created "Cheer Fury," which was sort of a cheer-themed Fists of Fury / Fruit Ninja mashup. I built it in GameSalad (with a little help on the trickier parts), illustrated all the background graphics and character animations (except for the cover art, contracted on Fiverr along with music creation), and recorded sound effects.

It ended up being quite a bit more work than I expected – and in hindsight I think the game was too hard, thus new users gave up on it too soon. Another lesson. 🤨

Photo of Todd

“Corey is super creative, thoughtful, innovative, responsible, ethical and an all-around decent, good egg.”

- Todd Cohen, former Director at KU

Photo of Andrea

“Corey is very collaborative, creative, and super fun to work with. He has a knack for solving tricky problems. I was always impressed by his ability to describe ideas, and willingness to brainstorm.

- Andrea Baker, VP at CannonDesign

Photo of Mark

“Corey is an excellent designer with strong technical chops. He is able to proactively move projects forward with minimal guidance and oversight. He is not afraid to tackle complex problems and always brings a fresh point of view. He can think big and enjoys brainstorming big ideas, but he also can patiently navigate his way through the weeds. His humor and style help to diffuse hectic, tense, and dynamic situations. Bottom line — he's a craftsman, he's fun to work with, and he gets stuff done.”

- Mark Kopulos, Product Designer at Sofar Sounds

Photo of Kaitlynn

“Corey has a way of bringing an idea to life by turning the brainstorming of a concept team into a clear product design. He understands the customer and is always creating great solutions that both delight the customer and save money and time for the company. He is also a great team member, always bringing ideas to the table along with a sense of humor.”

- Kaitlynn Griffith, former Sr. Director at ACT

Photo of Ben

“Corey continually raised the bar in intelligent UX design, prototyping, A/B testing, and maximizing conversions. He has an impressive depth of knowledge in UX research and a rich understanding of marketing, customer funnels, and value laddering. Corey is a fantastic team player, always sharing knowledge.

- Ben Mossman, Lead Solutions Architect at ACT

Photo of Rebekah

“As his manager at Kleinfelder, I appreciated Corey's willingness to learn new things and take on challenging projects. He is a very talented UX Designer with a good eye for incorporating what is really important into his design. He does not hesitate to ask questions. Corey is responsible and reliable – I never had any concerns that he would complete a project on time or produce a quality product.”

- Rebekah Stevens, BA Manager at Kleinfelder

Photo of Derek

“Corey’s always looking for the best ways to enhance a design, jumped right in when learning new research and collaboration tools, has a thorough understanding of the user-centered design process, and was able to thrive in very challenging circumstances. I’d highly recommend Corey for any senior or leadership position within user experience or product design and I’d love to have the opportunity to work with him again sometime in the future.”

- Derek Darby, former UX Director at ACT

Photo of Sri

“Corey is always user focused in his designs! His designs take into account the constraints and business goals and still are very user friendly. I have always found him to be super friendly and a great team player. His communication skills are amazing and he can easily express what his designs are trying to achieve. Super fun to work with as well!”

- Sri Rao, Sr. BA at ACT

Art, Animation, & Illustration

I've recently learned to create interactive vector animations in Rive (which DuoLingo uses) for Chegg and my Fullout side project.

Below is my interactive animated "SkillMate" AI-powered chatbot icon for Chegg Skills, which has an onLoad animation, a persistent calming slow breathing effect, a hover state, and an onClick outro animation:

For my CheerKeys iOS app, I created these frame-by-frame PNG animations for use in chat apps:

Yeah animation. Yaaasss animation. Fail animation. OMW animation. LOL animation. Popcorn animation. Sick animation. Tired animation.

A couple illustrations I did as contract work:

Illustration
Illustration

Everyone paints floor-to-ceiling murals on their kids' rooms, right? No? Hmmm. Since we moved a couple times, I ended up free-hand painting 4 rooms – here are the last two (click for zoom-able versions).

Eli's Nemo painted mural room. Christopher's Tarzan/Jungle Book painted mural room.

Education

Industrial Design B.F.A. | U. of Kansas

The KU ID program gave me a well rounded design education partly due to the three design professors' different approaches:

  • One professor was very user-focused and process-oriented.
  • Another was more market-driven: "What are the benefits and why would someone buy this?"
  • The third stressed the coolness and uniqueness of the form and solution.

Overall, the design-thinking user-centered ID process was perfect preparation for digital product design and UX work.

Ergonomics / Biomechanics M.S. | U. of Iowa

Despite my design professor telling me I should get my master's in Cognitive Science, I got it in Ergonomics / Biomechanics to improve my ability to design physical products. Turns out he was right. He was always right. Oh well — live and learn, I suppose.

For my thesis, I tested the muscle activity and efficiency of finger and postural muscles during slow, normal, and fast typing on a standard keyboard, a "fixed-split" ergonomic keyboard, and Kinesis' Contour keyboard (now discontinued, but similar to this). Turns out, there wasn't much difference. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Wrist posture when using each of the three keyboards.

Seth Godin's altMBA, June 2017 (Cohort 11)

I'm a big fan of marketing guru Seth Godin's teachings, and his month-long virtual altMBA workshop course was a great opportunity to dig deep on giving and receiving feedback, using empathy to find solutions, and asking "Who and what's it for?" Much of it aligned well with what I'd learned in my user-centered Industrial Design program at KU, but some concepts like the Business Model Canvas and Decision Trees were new to me. Overall, time well spent.

Our old pal Seth Godin.