Available for contract or full-time UI/UX roles
Steven Hanson
UI/UX Developer & Designer
Born and raised in the suburbs of Washington D.C., I discovered my passion for art at a young age. During my time at Virginia Commonwealth University, the Internet was just beginning to emerge in popular culture, and it was love at first click. In 1997, I started teaching myself HTML and Photoshop, taking what was in my head into the digital age.
I bring a rare combination of creative and technical skills to every project. I thrive in collaborative environments, working with equally talented individuals to take a concept all the way from idea to market. I’ve always been someone teams can depend on when it matters most, and I take pride in bringing years of best practices to every challenge I take on. If I truly love and believe in what I’m building, work will always come first.
My expertise now covers 20+ years operating at the intersection of design and engineering, delivering everything from high-fidelity prototypes and design systems to production-ready HTML, CSS, and accessible responsive interfaces. Equally comfortable leading UX strategy and getting hands-on in the build. Known for a sharp eye for detail, a problem-solving mindset, and a consistent record of owning the full deliverable lifecycle and transforming complex requirements into interfaces that are intuitive, accessible, and easy to use across Fortune 500 companies and Government agencies.
Principal UX Designer with 20+ years of experience
Roleconnect with teams building complex, meaningful products
Goalthe people on the other side of the screen feel understood, not just accommodated
BenefitPlaces That Trusted Me
Work History
SAIC
Public Trust Clearance. Embedded UX lead on CMPRS, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection's mission-critical enterprise digital modernization platform. Partnered with a cross-functional agile team of stakeholders, software developers, and systems engineers, applying human-centered design methodologies to deliver scalable, accessible UX solutions. This mission-driven work was recognized with the United States Interdiction Coordinator Award for Emerging Threats (2023), presented at the White House in honor of our team's work.
- Conducted a comprehensive UX audit of an inherited government agency framework, identifying critical pain points through usability reviews and delivering targeted design improvements that drove measurable gains in task efficiency and user adoption
- Owned the full design lifecycle across multiple apps and platforms, producing user research findings, user flows, wireframes, navigation structures, interaction patterns, reusable component library assets, low and high-fidelity prototypes, and developer-ready design specifications aligned to development requirements
- Devised a CSS delivery solution using AWS S3 to decouple compiled stylesheets from the development and deployment lifecycle, eliminating styling bottlenecks caused by rigid production push windows and enabling on-demand style updates independent of the full QA approval process
- Led accessibility remediation efforts in collaboration with the 508 compliance team, with resulting work selected as a featured best-practice example in a department-wide webinar
PricewaterhouseCoopers
Dedicated UX Developer on a large-scale enterprise procurement platform (Request It) within a scaled agile environment, serving as a shared UX resource across five cross-functional teams while maintaining design consistency at scale.
- Engineered customized Angular Material themes and Kendo UI components, delivering tailored, accessible, and scalable UX solutions aligned to enterprise design standards
- Championed a Lunch & Learn series to mentor and elevate UX literacy across development teams, personally authoring and presenting a session on BEM: CSS Methodology focused on scalable, team-based CSS architecture
- Developed and maintained a UI/UX coding standards library, style guides, and design standards reducing cross-team inconsistencies and serving as the primary knowledge transfer resource for onboarding developers
New York Life
Partnered with the UI Design team to deliver pixel-perfect, responsive web pages from high-fidelity wireframes at a $570B Fortune 500 insurance company, serving as the team's primary UX development contact and owning all UX deliverables.
- Built reusable style guide templates on semantic HTML5 and refactored CSS3, establishing a scalable foundation for future page development
- Defined and documented a design strategy and component best practices to streamline future page creation
- Ensured alignment between design solutions and enterprise architectural standards and objectives
PolitiFact / Tampa Bay Times
Full-cycle UI/UX developer responsible for the continuous evaluation, maintenance, and iterative improvement of a high-traffic news platform across multiple environments and repositories including Beanstalk, Git, and Bitbucket. Managed content across Amazon S3 Web Services and prototyped responsive wireframes for company-wide usage. Hand-selected by Deputy Director to support the newly-formed Digital Audience Revenue team.
- Served as sole custodian of all company-wide CSS3/SCSS styling, ensuring visual consistency and maintainability across the entire platform
- Redesigned the Presidential Promises page under tight deadlines during the 2016 election cycle, delivering a high-visibility, data-driven user experience on limited time and resources
- Optimized an 80,000+ subscriber Daystarter email template for seamless cross-browser and cross-client rendering, improving deliverability and user engagement
- Conceptualized and developed the Tampa Bay Times Flash Briefing Skill for Amazon Alexa, expanding the brand's digital reach into emerging voice interface platforms
- Implemented a subscriber notification tracking system, improving process visibility and communication reliability across TBO.com's user base
SiriusXM Satellite Radio
Web Development liaison and lead CSS3 Designer responsible for cross-departmental coordination across Development, Editorial, and Interactive teams in Washington, D.C. and New York, supporting network-wide maintenance and CMS governance.
- Designed and developed templates, web pages, graphics, and CS Elements within Oracle WebCenter Sites CMS, supporting high-volume content operations across multiple departments
- Administered CMS rights and access controls for all departments, ensuring secure and efficient content governance
- Researched, integrated, and maintained third-party analytics and tracking tools including Omniture, Qualtrics, and Maximizer, enabling data-driven decision making across teams
- Executed User Acceptance Testing and maintained up-to-date Confluence documentation, supporting QA processes and cross-team knowledge management
- Conducted ongoing 508 compliance quality assurance, ensuring platform accessibility standards were met across all web properties
- Designed and deployed internal backend web tools to streamline company-wide operational workflows
I Know a Guy (It's Me)
Skills & Tools
Design & Prototyping
Languages & Frameworks
Tools & Platforms
Expertise
Awards & Certifications
Behold... My Stuff!
Portfolio
Conveyance Monitoring System
End-to-end UX design and development including framework overhaul and SCSS architecture for a Government monitoring platform.
PwC - Request to Pay
Enterprise SaaS UX for PricewaterhouseCoopers' Request to Pay platform, built across five agile teams with a custom Sass architecture from scratch.
PolitiFact: Election Cycle UX
Homepage and footer redesigns, Truth-O-Meter rebranding, and responsive mockups for one of the web's most-visited political fact-checking platforms during the 2016 election cycle.
SiriusXM Channel Search
CSS lead and front end development liaison across D.C. and New York teams - styling the global navigation, channel search, and carousel layouts for one of the largest satellite radio platforms in the world.
New York Life / AARP Landings
Pixel-perfect responsive builds and a reusable component library for New York Life's AARP-partnered platform - the exclusive insurance provider for 37 million members.
Nice Things People Said (Unprompted)
Referrals
Steve is a rare find. He is able to design a site, factor in usability, and build it all himself. If I had another dream team of development folks to put together again, Steve would be a “must have.”
Tampa Bay Times
Isolating needs on development production teams means you have to fill that need. Hiring Steve to fill the need for UI front end developer with a direct effect on User Experience through CSS stylings was the key. Steve’s impact on the projects allowed us to realize the UX architecture fully while employing the design of Responsive and Accessibility UI directly into the code for project success.
Steve stepped things up by responding to the direct request of creating libraries and component deployment of CSS styles including the naming conventions that bring clarity to developer code. The libraries Steve created were used project wide across 5 development teams. Steve coupled with UX lead to help nurture and lead developers by teaching the implementation of the libraries and styles and how to integrate them into Angular as global styles and isolated component styles.
The success of the project was impacted deeply by the inclusion of Steve Hanson and his skillset, but further success was had due to Steve’s ability to learn new ways of code/UI improvement and then project those learnings into the developers skill set through thought leadership and small group/one on one collaboration. I strongly recommend Steve Hanson for any project that desires a successful outcome especially in the realm of taking Experience Design to code for User Interaction success.
PricewaterhouseCoopers
I had the privilege of working with Steve at the Tampa Bay Times. He was reliable, professional with an attention to detail that made him the perfect “go to” person when you wanted to be confident that things would be done correctly the first time.
Working with Steve was a pleasure as he always went above and beyond with great confidence while demonstrating a high level of professionalism and well thought out user experience decisions.
Steve would be a great asset to any company that is looking for a strong design and coding skill set with the ability to adapt quickly and execute. He possesses a great personality alongside extensive experience which makes him a solid team lead or member.
It’s these attributes that allow him to work well with others to identify problems, architect sound solutions and iron out wrinkles and get the job done.
Tampa Bay Times
Don't Be a Stranger
Contact
Like what you see? Download my resume or use the form below to get in touch.