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.
React and TypeScript functional-ideation prototype for Software-Defined Cloud Interconnect. Secured roadmap approval with an executive prototype. Framed an agentic model for network operations (agents that provision, diagnose, optimize, and decommission) and prototyped its NetBond agent: it shows its evidence, proposes a fix, and waits for the customer. Auto-resolve is off by default.
Prototype assistant for a cloud networking portal. It answers from live data, knows the current screen, previews each change with Do it and Cancel buttons, runs the same command a person would, and keeps approvals in a plain-language audit trail. Wrote the design spec for plugging another AT&T team's assistant into every screen.
Visual network designer unifying Global, Topology, and Circuit views of an enterprise network in one interface, built to replace a patchwork of five to eight separate tools. Drag-and-drop topology canvas, world map with connection arcs, circuit-level device panels, PDF export. Patent pending (AT&T). React and TypeScript.
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.
Daily job-application pipeline run as an agent with a human gate: discovers roles across boards and aggregators, vets companies, tailors the resume and cover letter from a claims bank where every line must trace to a verified fact, fills application forms in a dedicated browser profile, and parks anything only I may answer. Python and Node with Playwright.
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.
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.
Prototype service assurance console built with Lovable and refined by hand: observability views and incident triage flows for network services. TypeScript.
Shaped the mobile product experience for a modern credit card platform focused on financial inclusion for students and new-to-credit users.
Built the design practice from zero: product vision, research rituals, and the systems that let engineers ship with confidence.
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.
Proposed and led the unification of hundreds of legacy Fortran applications into role-based dashboards, shipped as the Acumen platform. One source of truth where there had been hundreds. Error rates fell 48%, with federal nuclear compliance preserved throughout.
End-to-end product design for the Acumen platform — strategy, flows, and visual system.
First persona-driven e-commerce strategy for a government retailer. Five buyer personas aligned retail, web, and collector channels around a single customer model. Cart abandonment fell 31%. Revenue rose 20%.
Set the UX direction for enterprise product lines, building the research cadence that fed product roadmaps.
Brand strategy and identity system for a craft soda company — retail-ready from day one.
Creative direction across digital and print for a national healthcare supply-chain company. Brand Overhaul of the Year, 2010.
Product consulting for PCG's education platform serving public school districts.
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.