research → product → traction → organizations that ship
I came up through Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas, and started practicing UX in the 1990s, before the label existed. Since then I have shipped product across finance, telecom, healthcare, retail, and government — through 126 projects and a couple of eras of the web.
Today I run a small design practice focused on three things: leading product design engagements, advising teams that want design to drive outcomes, and mentoring the next generation of senior designers.
126 products shipped 47 designers mentored $300K+ hardware savings 48% error reduction
Introduced AI design processes to the product design group and prototyped the agentic model for network operations: agents that provision, diagnose, optimize, and decommission, each showing its evidence and waiting for a person before it acts. Redesigned DNI Portal diagnostics to surface underused hardware, saving $300K+ through targeted decommissioning, and built VLAN migration and triage tools that cut resolution from weeks to minutes. Patent pending for a visual network designer that unifies global, topology, and circuit views in one interface.
Claude Code skill (film) plus toolkit (filmkit) that scripts, narrates with ElevenLabs, captures, animates with Remotion, scores, and masters narrated product films. AT&T brand standards (Aleck Sans, Flywheel tokens, the approved icon set, the sonic sting) ride as a switchable profile, with automated gates on every cut including a transcript check of narration against the script. Four films delivered in September 2026, including an AT&T executive film.
Proof of concept that turns a qualitative UX-research archive into something a product manager can ask. Claude extracts candidate findings with a verbatim quote, a citation, a confidence rating with a written reason, and tags. A researcher approves, edits, or rejects every candidate before it becomes a published insight. Questions get a synthesized answer with inline citations, a confidence level, and the gaps it did not cover, and the system says it has no coverage rather than inventing one. Next.js, Supabase with pgvector, Playwright suites, a 26-question eval set. Handed to AT&T's Power Platform team in July 2026.
My personal operations agent and the identity every Claude session on my machine runs as. A TypeScript MCP server with 71 registered tools, run as a launchd service over HTTP so sessions share it: session memory and open threads, a 1,200-file Obsidian vault searchable by substring, theme, or local embeddings, mail across four IMAP accounts, iMessages, Apple Notes, GitHub, Dropbox, a photo vision index, drafts written to the vault for review, posting to a Facebook Page and X by API. Backs 21 scheduled tasks behind human gates.
Paid family-history product with an AI family historian built on Claude inside a Stripe subscription, with tests for the privacy of the AI's family context, and a 13-agent research workflow (blind researchers by record type, adversarial verification per fact, a judge) that scored 93/100 against a DAR-accepted lineage record.
Daily autonomous curation agent for a fountain pen, paper, and ink almanac. It verifies stale entries, researches new ones, and publishes in English and Japanese only after gates: every field needs a source URL plus a verbatim quote, performance fields need two independent sources, holds are respected, and a daily digest reports every action. A citation radar tracks how AI assistants answer and cite questions in its niche.
Open-source accessibility audit for chart color palettes: WCAG non-text contrast, Machado 2009 color-vision-deficiency simulation, and OKLab delta-E separation. One engine with four faces: API, CLI, CI gate, and an MCP server listed in the official MCP Registry. TypeScript, on npm.
Web builder, npm package, and public MCP server for chart color: a solver and audit for categorical, sequential, and diverging palettes, checked against WCAG 2.2 non-text contrast, color-blind simulation, and grayscale, with honest pass and fail badges.
Season tracker for the F50 foiling catamaran circuit: venues, race-by-race standings, team profiles, and performance data, kept current by scheduled data syncs. A public MCP server at mcp.gpsail.net exposes the schedule and standings to AI assistants, with contract tests against the live endpoint.
Winning design in the first TX-30 Congressional Challenge Coin Competition (2024). One idea for a small, struck canvas: the Trinity River runs into the center of the coin, with Reunion Tower, the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, Fountain Place, Republic Center Tower and the Texas Star from Fair Park on its banks. The Congresswoman chose it herself for its clean lines and its theme of unity.
For Penumbra Movies, a Dallas film company (Gloria in the Dark, a 2019 festival winner at Austin Indie Fest, Anaheim and Birmingham): the logo, the website across desktop, tablet and mobile, the poster and press-kit assets, launched January 2020. For Las Damas in 2021: the look-book experience film, the pitch deck, the poster and a Día de los Muertos flyer.
Interactive resume styled as six classic operating systems (System 7, Mac OS 9, Windows 3.1, Windows XP, Mac OS X, BeOS) in a single HTML file with no framework and no build step. Period boot sequences, draggable windows, After Dark tribute screensavers, and a test that keeps its facts aligned with the shared registry.
Pillcast, a shipped app for a connected pill dispenser. Onboarding, pill status, Bluetooth pairing, summary and settings views, the logo and an app-promo film. Designed in 2014 to 2016.
Prototype sales enablement tool built on my own stack with AT&T Business as the modeled catalog: a quick value-prop generator, a product value lab with segment-fit scoring, a personas hub, AI responses to competitor claims, an ROI analyzer, battlecards, and AI roleplay practice against generated buyer personas. React, TypeScript, Supabase, Gemini.
Prototype chatbot interface for configuring network topology and API settings through conversation, with Azure settings management and JSON configuration export. React, TypeScript, Tailwind.
Hired by Public Consulting Group as portal consultant and strategist for its IMS, June to August 2013. Stakeholder interviews, design concepts A, B and final, the Monday presentation, project plan and status reports. Authored and designed.
Hired by The Schumacher Group as portal consultant and strategist. Authored the strategy and designed the portal: the assessment, interviews, designs and concepts deliverable (May 2015), product screens, an icon set and the site.
Real Sugar Soda Co and Oak Cliff Beverages: brand identity, the label system for every flavor with master builds and print production files, the 6-pack carton, brochure and vector logos, plus iPhone and Apple Watch concepts. 2014 to 2018.
Roy Lipski's personal site, designed in Adobe XD and built, with the image treatments and a final draft reviewed in 2020.
Consulting for Peppercorn.ai: the pitch deck design (Simple Pitch and the SVB fundraising webinar), customer personas, UX research in Sketch, the brand guide and logo.
For Deserve, a credit-card startup, in July to October 2019: subscription discovery and cancellation flows (recurrences, stop requests, charge-after-stop), a competitor analysis, and milestone walkthrough videos.
The named products of a utility-software company's design practice: EDGE (shown to CenterPoint Energy and NAVFAC), Utility360 mobile, Duty Roster, Damage Assessment for the field, Service Center, and Home Service Plus for CenterPoint's home-services arm. Design ops and modular libraries tied into development; 36 products launched.
Began as a Conscious Shell contractor in 2016 and became VP Experience Design and Board Advisor. Built the design practice from zero: product vision, research rituals, design ops and modular libraries for 20+ energy-grid products, 36 launched, among them EDGE, Utility360, Duty Roster, Damage Assessment, Service Center and Home Service Plus. Design work was material to the ARCOS acquisition.
Unified component library and design tokens across web and mobile — cut handoff time roughly in half and standardized accessibility.
A flexible canvas for operators to compose, compare, and share KPIs without waiting on an analyst.
A cohesive 400+ icon system designed for clarity at 16px and expressiveness at 64px.
Mapped the end-to-end homeowner journey and redesigned the dispatch experience around the technicians actually doing the work.
Rebuilt the customer portal around real account tasks — replacing a brochure site with a tool customers actually use.
End-to-end product design for the Acumen platform — strategy, flows, and visual system.
Owned ACUMEN, GE's nuclear core-monitoring platform, end to end from 2013 to 2016: hundreds of legacy Fortran applications unified into role-based dashboards (errors down 48%, federal compliance intact), the usability standards and style guide, the user manual, personas, the product vision and executive decks, a NUREG position paper, and the marketing collateral.
Led UX strategy for the U.S. Mint's online store and wrote the strategy itself: "The United States Mint: Strategy and Information Architecture" (v2.5, 32 pages, 2014). Buyer interviews became eight personas, from the Dedicated Numismatist to the Millennial Novice, and the first persona-driven e-commerce strategy for a government retailer. Cart abandonment fell 31% and revenue rose 20%.
Set the UX direction for enterprise product lines, building the research cadence that fed product roadmaps.
Creative direction across digital and print for a national healthcare supply-chain company. Brand Overhaul of the Year, 2010.
Brand strategy and identity system for a confectionery e-commerce venture.
Your pilot works. Nobody uses it. Two weeks inside a stalled AI pilot to find out why the humans are not adopting it. Most pilots fail on interaction design and workflow fit, not on the model. I map where people drop off, redesign the interaction model, and hand your engineering team a path they can build.
Design direction for teams shipping AI without a design leader. Ongoing advisory for teams building AI products. Roadmap direction, review of agent UX before it ships, and mentoring for the designers and engineers doing the work. Usually follows a teardown.
Leverage 20+ years of shipping product to pressure-test direction, sequencing, and the org work that makes design land.
From discovery research through launch and post-launch measurement — design that survives contact with production.
One-on-one coaching for product, UI, and UX designers ready to move into senior and leadership roles.
“He is always ready to discuss the pros and cons of various strategies or designs and work with you.”
Reach Micah Boswell through the contact form at conscious-shell.com/#contact or on LinkedIn. His personal page, with every profile that is his, is micahboswell.com.