Bryan Holland
Principal Product Designer · UX / UI / IA
Twenty years designing software where a mistake has a consequence — safety analytics that
feed NHTSA, AI governance for regulated trading, mortgage documents behind a third of US
applications, healthcare prior authorization. I do the research, design the workflow, build
the design system that keeps it coherent, and increasingly write the front end
myself. I can present to a VP in the morning and sit with an engineer that
afternoon without the work changing meaning in between. I've run my own practice, led
remote teams and mentored designers — and I'm just as useful as the only designer on
the problem.
Experience
Founder — AUTH57
2025 — Present
Prior-authorization and appeal paths · self-directed, alongside client work
- I couldn't find a straightforward way to see the approval steps and appeal path for a drug, so I built one — 10,000+ drugs, services and procedures, generic and branded, with the source bulletin behind every answer.
- Designed and built every surface myself: the API, an MCP server for LLM agents, a Salesforce integration, native apps, the React front end, the backend, and two LLMs trained for the task.
- The point was putting it in the hands of patients and caregivers instead of leaving it locked inside insurer and provider systems.
Product Designer & Developer — ActsVentures
2026 — Present
Contract, via A.Team · faith-based mobile marketplace, early alpha
- Proposed the four-user model — Seekers, Doers, Supporters, Growth Advocates — which changed how the founder was thinking about the product and shaped the go/no-go on the next funded phase.
- Designed and built it — Next.js 16, React 19, Supabase, Tailwind, shipping on Vercel — with Claude as the development partner. Design decision to running screen in the same sitting, no handoff and no translation layer.
- Guest-first: people can act without an account, because a login wall between a person and a moment of help is the wrong trade. Enforced at the database with append-only row-level security, so a record of participation is never overwritten.
Sole UX & Product Designer — ArtifactIQ
2025 — 2026
AI governance for U.S. equity trading
- The design system didn't exist yet, so I built it from a blank page — type scale, 8pt grid, component library, and the do's and don'ts written down so engineering could build without checking with me every time.
- Designed the product itself: workspaces for four roles moving a request through intent, policy, approval, execution and audit.
- Delivered five production-ready screens and a spec detailed enough to build straight from.
Founding Product Designer — Link.me
2025
Creator-economy platform with substantial daily traffic
- Designed the personalization layer — an AI-generated experience per user, where the whole design problem was making the output feel trustworthy rather than generic.
- Built the analytics dashboards creators and agencies actually check, and a merch-builder simple enough to use without a tutorial.
Product Design Principal — Honda / Acura
2025
Loyalty for the 0 Series EV era
- Extended ownership loyalty into the vehicle itself — the in-car screen becomes the loyalty surface, asking about an upgrade at the moment earned miles unlock a new model.
- Designed the program and the in-vehicle prompts: 3D NFTs, TestDrive prompts, Scan-n-Swap.
Product Design Principal — Keepsi
2024
Marketplace for buying, selling and minting digital goods, including Apple's spatial platform
- The core problem was motion and timing — making a digital hand-off feel like something had actually changed hands.
UX Principal, Core Buy Flow — Apple, Global Preferred Partners
Feb — Mar 2022
Checkout for Apple's authorized reseller and retail partner network
- Owned the Core Buy Flow checkout used across the partner network. Built a pixel-perfect, fully functional Figma prototype with the design system under it — tokens, components, dev-ready handoff — to Apple's standard, inside Magento's engineering constraints.
- Prototyped every state, not just the default path, so partners could read their status at a glance across a network spanning multiple languages and regions.
Principal Product Designer — Hyundai Motor Group, SODAS
Nov 2021 — Mar 2022
Safety Analytics System · NHTSA-facing
- Hyundai had tried a dashboard-with-dials and their analysts rejected it. I designed a workflow-first tool instead — an alert feed, a search tool, a case builder — for 80 people mining 14 million service records for safety patterns.
- NHTSA-facing work, so accuracy mattered as much as usability: a wrong read here starts or misses a recall investigation.
- Getting 80 people across four disciplines onto one interaction model, with no authority over any of them, took as much work as the design — mostly workshops and repeated listening sessions.
Lead Product Designer — Ellie Mae / ICE Mortgage Technology
Oct 2020 — Jul 2021
AllRegs document platform
- AllRegs had never had a real design system. I built the first one, and the grid it still runs on.
- Designed the marketplace connecting lenders, compliance teams and regulators around 400,000+ documents updated at 1,000+ per day, covering roughly a third of all US mortgage applications.
Sr. UX Lead / Product Designer — United Healthcare Group
RealAppeal
- Seven weeks to a deadline and three legacy systems that didn't talk to each other. Rebuilt the whole thing as one app people could actually stick with — coaching, content, food and exercise tracking.
Product Design Principal — Various companies
2014 — 2019
BOSCH — redesigned the carpooling app their factory workers use to get to work.
Belkin — rebuilt Hybris/SAP ecommerce navigation for a global rollout, then built the USB-C section and configurator on almost no budget and a tight deadline; media outlets voted it best-in-class.
Lexus — wrote and presented the Mobile Guidelines Playbook, mentored the junior designers on their internal team, and built the templating system their dealer network still uses for ads.
Open Book Ben (2014–2015) — a two-sided marketplace that wasn't working, so I split it into two products, Verify for businesses and Matchmaker for consumers, owning naming, branding and UI for both while leading a remote team through the split.
gruvi mystics · hyperr — equity-partner branding and product work for two early-stage apps.
Senior UX Consultant / Architect — Various agencies
2010 — 2013
Studio 7 Media, Frequency, Deutsch LA, Oracle, MEA Digital, Rapp/OmniCom, Sapient Nitro
Volkswagen (Deutsch LA) — designed “Find-a-Match,” a car-shopping tool pairing a matching interface with live dealer inventory, tested with real shoppers before launch, plus six further projects across VW.com.
Activision, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (Sapient Nitro) — built the consumer web ecosystem for a launch that did $1B in 36 hours, including a real-time dashboard pulling Reddit, Facebook and YouTube into one feed.
Disney, TRON: Legacy — turned a room full of stakeholder ideas into a 75-page wireframe set in five days, covering a Flash site, a 3D game and an avatar builder.
Mattel — HotWheels.com redesign and a UGC campaign built around a video-enabled toy car.
Toyota — the Entune in-vehicle interface, and ProductShare for the University of Toyota.
Also AARP, Nestlé/Nescafé, Charles Schwab, Zact, Sunglass Hut/Oakley, Target, Oracle Fusion, PG&E, Mitsubishi.
Early career — ariadne spun communications · Dahlin Smith White · teaching
1993 — 2010
ariadne spun communications (Owner, 1993–2001) — founded and ran an information-architecture and web consulting practice for eight years, hiring and directing the team. Early clients included Netscape (Communicator 1.0), Cisco (their first web server), AutoDesk, Charles Schwab, Travelocity's first website, and SFMOMA's first public kiosk.
Intel (Dahlin Smith White, 1997–1998) — produced the first genuinely interactive Super Bowl commercial Intel ever ran.
Taught information architecture and UX at the Center for Electronic Art and UC Berkeley.
Self-directed
Bench — build execution for spacecraft manufacturing
2026
automaticdelight.com/bench · running prototype, designed and built
- A technician's traveler and a planner's board sharing one token set at two densities — 64px controls for a gloved hand, 40px for a cursor, from the same declaration.
- Photographs the hardware kit and catches a wrong-series washer before install starts; enforces torque sequence and fastener stack-up so an error surfaces at the wrench instead of at buy-off two hours later.
- Measures itself — task time and tap count per step — so a design change is argued with a number rather than a preference.
- Grew out of a similar product I designed for a pitch at SpaceX: an iPad tool that photographs the fixture, confirms the right fasteners are at hand, and alerts supply when they aren't.
Skills
Design — 0→1 product definition, enterprise and operational UX, design systems, IA, micro-interactions and motion, accessibility (WCAG)
Research — contextual inquiry, shadowing, usability testing, stakeholder workshops
Leading — team leadership and mentoring, design direction, aligning cross-functional groups without formal authority
Tools — Figma (component systems, variables, interactive prototyping, motion), Adobe CS, InVision, Proto.io, Axure
Build — HTML/CSS/JS, React, TypeScript, Next.js, Tailwind, Supabase; ship to Vercel. Claude as a development partner.
Education
Product Development — Parsons School of Design, New York, NY
Digital Media — Center for Electronic Art, San Francisco, CA
Mathematics & Fine Art — University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT