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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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, an AI recruiting startup: strategy, customer personas and UX research. No visual design work.
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.
EDGE, Treverity's analytics platform for utilities: configuration-based, with GIS, dashboards and mobile apps. The 2016 CenterPoint Energy build carried Gas Leak Management, Exception Management with SAP correction, TCC, IG Geospatial, Engineering Projects, Primary Metering, Service Center, VPN Logins, Crew Productivity and Premise Research dashboards, with Siemens Spectrum Power 7 and EnergyIP integrations. Around it: Utility360 mobile, Duty Roster, Damage Assessment for the field, Service Center and Home Service Plus. Design ops and modular libraries tied into development; 36 products launched.
The gas operations product line: leak management, dispatch situational views, lead clustering on the map, exceptions and outstanding leaks, in light and dark UI. Designed in 2018 and 2019 for CenterPoint Energy.
Damage Assessment for the field and the control room: a geospatial viewer, work items and assignments, snapshots from the field, rollups and restoration progress, with the mobile app that walks a crew through a work item. Designed from 2016 to 2020.
Utility 360: premise and event views that put every outage, service call and crew for an address in one place, on desktop and on the phone, with premise research for the field. Designed from 2019 to 2021.
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.
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.
End-to-end product design for the Acumen platform — strategy, flows, and visual system.
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.