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
Embedded UX Lead for CMPRS, a mission-critical federal modernization platform designed to support real-time data visualization and operational workflows for national public safety initiatives. Recognized with the United States Interdiction Coordinator Award for Emerging Threats (2023) presented at the White House for excellence in product modernization.
- Platform Leadership: Orchestrated the end-to-end design strategy for a 9-module federal platform, unifying complex geospatial and analytics workflows into a cohesive interaction model that drove mission-critical success
- Modernization Strategy: Engineered a decoupled CSS/UI architecture via AWS S3, shifting from 8-week batch releases to on-demand updates. This eliminated full-system re-deployments, reducing release cycle latency by 90% and removing unnecessary compliance bottlenecks for cross-functional teams
- Operational Strategy: Established direct feedback loops with field operators to translate mission-critical constraints into platform-wide UX improvements, bridging the gap between field-level operational needs and product strategy
- Systems Architecture: Architected a scalable, token-based design system standardizing UI components across nine modules, reducing design-to-development latency while ensuring consistent brand integrity
- Governance & Standards: Transformed accessibility from a checkbox exercise into a strategic benchmark, establishing UX-driven WCAG governance adopted as agency-wide best practice
PricewaterhouseCoopers
Served as the sole, shared UX resource across five cross-functional agile development teams for a large-scale enterprise Request to Pay financial application.
- UX Architecture & Strategy: Championed the end-to-end design strategy for a complex multi-stage procurement pipeline, delivering a persistent dual-context workflow tracker that provided stakeholders with high-level visibility alongside granular, per-transaction status
- Design Systems Governance: Established enterprise-grade design standards by authoring a unified UX/UI component library, eliminating cross-app visual discrepancies and streamlining the design-to-development handoff for five simultaneous agile workstreams
- Strategic Technical Leadership: Championed a scalable BEM-based CSS architecture across five teams to resolve naming collisions, and led a focused Lunch & Learn session to align developers on these standards, improving code velocity and ensuring predictable component behavior
- Accessibility-First Engineering: Led the implementation of high-performance, WCAG-compliant interface components, enforcing stringent accessibility standards from the initial sprint to ensure full compliance for a high-stakes, mission-critical financial platform
New York Life
Served as the primary UX development lead for a $570B Fortune 500 insurer, bridging the gap between high-fidelity design wireframes and high-performance, responsive web portals for AARP's 37 million members.
- Responsive Architecture: Architected high-performance, responsive interface patterns for a massive member-base, ensuring cross-device stability and brand alignment across complex marketing campaign lifecycles
- Design-to-Dev Strategy: Streamlined design-to-development handoff by establishing reusable code repositories, eliminating UI inconsistencies and accelerating the delivery of high-fidelity responsive features
- Inclusive Engineering: Championed accessibility as a first-class engineering priority, implementing WCAG/508-compliant development practices tailored for older demographics to ensure equitable digital access
PolitiFact / Tampa Bay Times
Directed UX architecture and design strategy for a high-traffic national platform during the 2016 election cycle, spearheading digital modernization to optimize editorial workflows and audience engagement.
- Editorial Strategy & Modernization: Directed a content-first homepage redesign transforming static layouts into high-density editorial interfaces, driving newsletter conversions and engagement during peak periods
- Data-Driven UX Engineering: Developed interactive browser prototypes to validate complex data layouts, mitigating user trust risks and ensuring information legibility during rapid election-cycle content shifts
- Emerging Platform Innovation: Conceptualized and executed a cross-platform VUI strategy by developing a custom Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing skill, expanding digital reach into voice-first touchpoints
SiriusXM Satellite Radio
Served as the primary development liaison and lead CSS3 designer for a global media platform, orchestrating cross-departmental collaboration between D.C. and New York engineering teams to unify site-wide navigation and search functionality.
- Cross-Team Governance: Bridged distributed design and engineering teams by translating complex design intent into performant, scalable code while mitigating technical production constraints
- Platform Unification Strategy: Directed navigation architecture for the SiriusXM/XM rebrand, consolidating disparate subscriber experiences into a unified platform supporting millions of users
- Accessibility Advocacy: Pioneered WCAG-compliant interface standards, championing screen-reader usability through JAWS testing and user feedback loops establishing accessibility as a core priority
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
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