Vince Welter

Lead Product Designer

Simplifying the complex through human-centered design

Portfolio

Khoros Community

Khoros | Lead Product Designer, UX Strategy

Spring of 2020

This was the transformation of a market leading SaaS enterprise community platform, code named "Aurora". Aurora brought a substantial cross-collaboration with multiple global teams across product, engineering, services, design and docs. We took this opportunity to start fresh with customer insights and data analysis across all of the features. This was also a time where we established a scalable cohesive experience based architecture with two design language systems to help support different roles and provide consistent reusable components.

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Khoros Community

SaaS Community Platform

Khoros Community

Project Overview

In early 2020, I joined a team of designers, product managers, and developers in a transformation of an enterprise community SaaS platform, a white-labeled product designed to be highly customized. I set out to question everything that was done in the previous platform and collaborate with cross-function internal teams as well as our customers to reimagine the next-generation digital community.

Challenge

Outdated platform with high costs of ownership, poor performance, and security issues. Customers felt the current platform had become unfocused, bloated, and were faced with a lengthy launch process and customization challenges that heavily involved support and services.

Solution

Design a new platform experience that aimed to provide a sleek, modern UX that adheres to community best practices while still giving brands the flexibility to make changes based on their needs. Modernize the overall product experience, improve moderation, and introduce self-serving tools.

My Role

I worked on this multi-year journey as a Senior and Lead Product Designer. As a part of my process I incorporated UX research, UX strategy, as well as UI design and prototyping in Figma and HTML/CSS. A few of the features I led discovery and design for were: content creation, management content, member authentication, knowledge base guides, value surveys, rule builder, dev-tools, and contributed to our design language systems.

My Design Process

Each feature in this transformation was looked at as a clean slate with the vision to what the consumer needed and expected. I concentrated on the desktop and responsive views, and accessibility functionality keeping a consistent experience through our design language systems.

  • Research & DiscoveryInitial kick-off discussions with the product manager and lead engineers as well as gathered data on competitive analysis, data investigations, analytics, and customer insight data reviews.
  • Design IterationsMultiple design directions produced in Figma to which I would then lead discussions in design critiques for team collaboration, as well as keeping in constant connection with the product manager and engineers. Depending on the feature, I would also share with customers to walk through early directions and gather feedback.
  • PrototypingTypically I would produce prototypes in Figma to help explain the experience for internal walkthroughs and customer conversations. Some features would take a deeper dive into developing HTML and CSS prototypes for proof of concepts.
  • Developer Documentation and Design HandoffsEach feature was then carefully documented in Jira and Figma for the engineer to follow.
  • UX TestingAfter the feature had been developed, I then took the final step in the review of my features in testing for the overall experience, design pattern consistencies, responsiveness, and accessibility; passing back to the engineer if issues were found or moving to team review to be shipped to the customer.

Content Creation Workflow

Content creation is at the center of how any community collaborates with each other. I strived to design the create experience to be as close as possible to the published experience by keeping consistent spacing, font styling, and overall layout structures so that no surprises would appear to the author once the content was published.

Challenge: Very form driven data entry, data entry spread out, a lot of bouncing around.

Solution: All content entries display in place, size and layout as it will be when published; clearly sectioned content areas.

Content Creation Workflow

Managing Content & Moderation

This feature included combining what was multiple dashboards and hidden boards in various locations in classic community to one new centralized content management dashboard, where users could perform all tasks related to content moderation, including managing content drafts and reviewing spam and abuse reports on content.

Challenge: Multiple dashboards scattered around the community, some hidden, limited features; difficult to manage moderation.

Solution: One central location for all dashboards, multiple tasks a click away to moderate and manage content.

Managing Content & Moderation

Simplifying Authentication

Rethought the end-to-end experience for how new and existing members authenticate into the platform. A lot of research and exploration was put into this stage to help define our forms engine, required and optional field sets, and validation states. I also created a new experience to give admins the ability to self-configure not only the sign-in experience for the customer, but also the ability to configure different types of SSO auth methods that talked to the customers SSO, where in the classic community this was configured through back-end configurations that Support or Services had to help customize with the customer.

Challenge: Customization required for mixed authentication methods, long forms causing registration drop-offs.

Solution: Simplify authentication forms, introduce self-serve configurations to eliminate costly customizations.

Authentication Methods
Admin Configuration Experience
Admin Configuration Experience

Structuring Knowledge Base Guides

KB Guides was a brand new feature to the platform that provided a way for community managers to host and provide structured navigation to other articles within the community. I brought a simple yet powerful way to structure articles inside sections that gave the viewer access to relevant content effortlessly. This feature introduced a configuration dashboard to add guides, chapters, and articles as well as widget configurations to display different paths to get into a guide grouping.

Challenge: No clear navigation structure for the reader to view other KB articles. Each article had no clear path to similar articles.

Solution: Provide a user-friendly approach to presenting valuable information, making it easier for the reader to consume and find what they need in a given subject matter.

Structuring Knowledge Base Guides

Surfacing Value Surveys

Enable customers to track NPS (Net Promoter Score) or CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) score via common surveys and gather feedback from their end users on their community experience. This involved an admin interface that allowed configurations to when the survey would show to question management that would be served in the survey. One big consideration was to offer the survey to the viewer in a way that didn't interrupt the flow they were trying to accomplish in the community, but to gently ask if they would mind in answering a few questions. Customers and internal Khoros teams would used this data to report on community ROI, health metrics, and overall community feedback.

Challenge: Disruptive experience for the end user, theming and when to surface the feedback prompt was a customization with the Services team.

Solution: Provide a self-service configuration allowing complete control of the design and when to and how often to ask for feedback.

Value Surveys

Survey Configurations

Results

By applying a user-centered design process, I delivered a streamlined and refreshed community experience that improved clarity and usability for both community managers and its members. The redesigned Aurora platform not only aligned with key business goals, but also significantly enhanced the customer experience. Through research, iterative design, prototyping, and close cross-functional collaboration, I ensured my solutions effectively addressed user needs and delivered lasting impact.

Khoros Community

Jive Unified Admin

Jive Software | Lead Product Designer

Fall of 2017

This project introduced a new platform designed to support Jive's cloud-based customers by enabling centralized management of multiple communities within a single user experience. The solution provided administrators with a unified member directory across all communities, while also streamlining the management of enterprise system integrations such as SAML, LDAP, OpenSocial, and custom solution authorities.

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Jive Unified Admin

Jive Software

Jive Admin

Project Overview

This project focused on building a new platform to help Jive’s cloud-based customers manage multiple communities through a single, unified experience. Designed with scalability in mind, the platform consolidated user management and enterprise integrations into one streamlined admin console.

Challenge

Previously, administrators were required to manage users and integrations separately within each community, creating inefficiencies and inconsistent experiences. Jive needed a centralized solution that could support complex enterprise requirements while remaining intuitive for administrators across global organizations.

Solution

Working with the next-generation architecture team across San Francisco, Portland, and Tel Aviv, I set out to design an admin console that unified community management. The platform enabled administrators to oversee members across all communities from one place, while also supporting critical integrations such as SAML, LDAP, OpenSocial, and custom authorities.

My Role

I led the UX efforts across information architecture, user flows, task mapping, wireframes, and prototypes. Partnering closely with the UI designers and cross-functional teams, I facilitated discovery workshops and translated requirements into agile stories to ensure a user-centered solution that met both business and customer needs.

Product Discovery and Data Mapping

To begin, I focused on developing a clear understanding of the challenges within the existing admin console. I conducted interviews with multiple end-users to uncover pain points, gather insights, and build empathy for their workflows. These findings informed the foundation of the project, enabling me to define the information architecture for the new platform and map out detailed user task flows that directly addressed user needs.

Jive Admin - Data Mapping

Sketching & Wireframing

With requirements, user flows, and the information architecture in place, I began sketching and designing wireframes for the admin console and unified sign-on experience. I facilitated weekly brainstorming sessions and wireframe critiques with cross-functional teams, enabling rapid iteration and refinement of the user experience prior to moving into design and development.

Sign-in process
Jive Admin - Sketching
Community member and settings management
Jive Admin - Wireframes

Feature Prototyping

Throughout the project, I created interactive prototypes to illustrate complex user interactions and attached them directly to Jira stories, ensuring developers had clear visibility into how features should function in practice. In addition, I built prototypes to support user testing on key areas of the admin console and unified sign-on experience. These prototypes enabled me to validate workflows, such as signing in, managing users, and user migration, and refine them based on feedback to deliver a more seamless and intuitive experience.

Jive Admin - Prototype

Design and Development

Close collaboration was essential to keeping our globally distributed teams aligned, with engineering in Tel Aviv and design in Portland. I facilitated weekly design discovery sessions with Engineering and QA to review upcoming sprints, walking through the agile stories I had defined to ensure shared understanding of the user experience. Final design patterns and front-end implementation were executed by the UI design team, with ongoing iteration and feedback loops to maintain quality and consistency across the platform.

Community member and settings management
Jive Admin - Community Member Settings
Batch import members to a community
Jive Admin - Batch Import
Jive Admin

Jive Daily - iPad App

Jive Software | Product & UI Designer

Fall of 2017

Jive Daily was originally designed exclusively for mobile phones, targeting the needs of desk-less workers. As iPads became increasingly common in the workplace, our team identified an opportunity to extend the experience to a larger form factor.

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Jive Daily - iPad App

Jive Software

Jive Daily - iPad

Project Overview

This proof-of-concept project explored how Jive Daily could expand beyond mobile and into a dedicated iPad application, addressing the growing use of tablets in the workplace. The goal was to reimagine the experience for a larger screen while maintaining consistency with the existing mobile app. By adapting and extending key features, the iPad version aimed to better support productivity and engagement for desk-less workers.

Challenge

While a responsive browser-based experience was available on tablets, it offered a limited feature set compared to what a dedicated native application could deliver. The challenge was to envision a tablet experience that met user expectations while expanding functionality beyond the constraints of the responsive design.

Solution

While understanding existing mobile users needs, and the data they were missing from a smaller platform, I set out to create a native tablet version of Jive Daily. Leveraging established UI components, the new design would provide a seamless, optimized experience for tablet users while aligning with Jive's broader mobile strategy.

My Role

I was responsible for defining the user experience and visual design for the iPad version of Jive Daily. Building on the existing iPhone app, I adapted the interface to leverage the larger screen resolution while introducing new data sets and layouts tailored to the needs of desk-less workers.

Information Architecture

My first step was to analyze and map the existing Jive Daily mobile app architecture. This allowed me to gain a clear understanding of the information flow, navigation patterns, and feature hierarchy. By visualizing the current structure, I was able to identify opportunities and challenges unique to the iPad, laying the groundwork for a scalable architecture that could support new data sets and an expanded user experience.

Jive Daily - Information Architecture

Hi-fi Wireframe Explorations

Building on early research and customer feedback, I began exploring layout concepts tailored for the iPad experience. I designed high-fidelity wireframes to test how core features and workflows would adapt across both portrait and landscape orientations, ensuring flexibility and usability in a tablet environment. This step allowed me to quickly validate design directions and refine the user experience before moving into detailed design.

Exploration v1
Jive Daily - Explore 1
Exploration v2
Jive Daily - Explore 2
Exploration v3
Jive Daily - Explore 3

Prototype iPad Designs

Following multiple iterations and design critiques with the team, I translated the refined wireframes into high-fidelity screens and built a full interactive prototype using InVision. This prototype allowed stakeholders to experience the product in context, test interactions, and provide meaningful feedback before development. Below are selected screens from the final prototype exploration.

Jive Daily - News Design
Inbox and Search Drawers

The Inbox and Search drawers were designed to be easily accessible through dedicated buttons in the bottom tab bar, as well as intuitive left and right swipe gestures. This approach ensured quick access to core functionality while maintaining a seamless tablet experience.

Jive Daily - Inbox Search Design
Jive Daily - iPad

Jive Community Theming

Jive Software | UI Developer

Fall 2011 - Fall 2015

During my time on Jive's Professional Services team, I had the opportunity to collaborate closely with customers remotely and directly on-site. Each engagement was a chance to listen, understand their unique challenges, and translate their brand into a Jive community experience that felt both authentic and engaging. These collaborations not only strengthened the product's impact, but also gave me invaluable insight into how design can bring clarity and connection to diverse organizations.

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Jive Community Theming

SaaS Community Platform

Jive Theming

Project Overview

Working as a UI developer at Jive engaged me in many opportunities to collaborate with internal and external customer teams. Communication among all the working teams was tremendously key to a successful project.

Meeting with Jive customers was an amazing opportunity. I would often go on-site to be a part of a two to three day workshop where our project management, engineers, customer support and design would meet and listen to our customers goals and concerns they were trying to solve. The face-to-face meetings with our customers brought my empathy towards their use cases of a community to what Jive needed to become in order to make their community successful.

My Role

I led over 130 custom theme engagements, delivering end-to-end solutions that included information architecture, wireframing, UI design, and front-end development. Partnered with clients through on-site workshops and remote consulting to craft tailored, user-focused community experiences.

On-site Workshop

One customer I had the opportunity to meet with on-site was NBC Universal. For three days myself, project management, strategy, and customer success, strategized and brainstormed ideas from the analytical data, platform survey data, to employee feedback. I was able to focus on the different types of personas, ask questions, and brainstorm ideas around solutions that would support their global community needs.

Challenge

One of their main concerns was adoption for their two very distinct populations (US & International) in terms of use and knowledge of their community named Wave. They wanted their initial community landing page to give their employees the feeling of belongingness and present information that was important to them. The focus was on continuing to drive user registrations and on-boarding for the two sets of populations.

Solution

My solution focused on re-envisioning the community homepage to drive adoption and engagement. By surfacing Wave resources and collaboration tools for onboarding, adding global time-zone support, highlighting cross-business content, and introducing visual community health indicators, I created a clearer, more welcoming experience that encouraged collaboration across teams worldwide.

Discovery session
Theming - Workshop
Sketching on the plane home and wireframing
Theming - Sketches
Final NBC branded community home page design
Theming - Final Design
Jive Theming

My Process

Product Discovery

Product Discovery

Every project begins with alignment. I facilitate kickoff sessions with cross-functional stakeholders to establish clarity around the problem, business requirements, target users, and success metrics. With distributed teams being the norm, I emphasize open communication and shared ownership to ensure a strong foundation before moving forward.

Exploration & Research

Exploration & Research

With goals defined, I shift to research. Reviewing customer feedback, analyzing usage data, conducting competitive analysis, and when possible, observing user behavior directly. The insights are translated into artifacts such as user journeys, task flows, information architecture, and personas, providing a clear map of both user needs and business opportunities.

Ideation & Wireframing

Ideation & Wireframing

From here, I explore solutions through sketching and wireframing. Typically generating multiple concepts and leveraging design critiques to test and bounce ideas off of others. These sessions lead to high fidelity wireframes that capture both structure and flow, while staying closely aligned with engineering and product management.

Prototyping and Validation

Prototyping & Validation

To evaluate solutions, I create interactive prototypes tailored to the project's level of fidelity. These are tested with end users to uncover pain points, validate assumptions, and gather actionable feedback. I iterate quickly, refining the experience until it meets user needs and aligns with business objectives.

Visual Design

Visual Design

Once validated, I move into visual design applying design system components and accessibility standards to ensure a cohesive and well thought out user interface. This step includes refining layouts, typography, and interaction details, ensuring the product maintains consistency across platforms. The result is high-fidelity screens and specifications ready for development hand-off.

Development & Delivery

Development & Delivery

Finally, I partner with engineering to bring the feature to life. I write detailed agile stories that capture experience requirements, host story walkthroughs, and support sprint planning. Throughout development, I collaborate closely with engineers and QA to resolve issues and confirm the final product meets design intent and delivers a high-quality user experience.

Side Projects

Halloween Fun

iOS Sticker Pack | UI & Development

Fall of 2016

My very first published "app", a Halloween sticker pack for iOS 10! WIth Halloween being my absolute favorite time of year, I combined the passion for the holiday with design and technology to create a playful, engaging experience. Bringing this idea to life was equal parts design challenge and pure fun.

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Halloween Fun

iOS Sticker Pack | UI & Development

Project Overview

The time was June of 2016, iOS 10 was just announced to the developers at WWDC. I'd been on the developers program for quite a few years with all great intentions to design and develop an app. Along came Stickers for iMessage that Apple had just announced. No, it wasn't an app by any real means, but I thought here's my chance to at least design something and get on the App Store. What a fun experience it was.

Halloween Fun Sticker App Download on the App Store

Discovery

I started off doing what research I could from Apple about how the Sticker packs would work. Through out the summer I would take photos of objects here and there that would spark ideas with me into the icons I wanted to create and the color palettes I'd use. I then began sketching ideas on my iPad using Paper by FiftyThree.

Halloween Fun - Sketching

Final Designs

After I had some ideas sketched out, I moved on to the high-fidelity design work in Sketch. Finally after a multiple late evenings of icon creations, I setup to create the screenshots and the many of many app icon sizes. In early October I published my first sticker app to the App Store.

Halloween Fun - Final Design
Halloween Fun Sticker App Download on the App Store

About Me

Vince Welter

Hello 👋,

I'm Vince, a Product Designer based in Portland, OR, with over a decade of experience designing human-centered solutions for two of the industry-leading SaaS community platforms. My career has spanned product design, UX, and front-end development, giving me a well-rounded perspective on building thoughtful user experiences. I design with empathy and turn complex problems into simple, scalable solutions, always prioritizing usability, accessibility, and clear visual communication.

I began my journey as a front-end/UI developer, consulting with enterprise companies to understand their challenges and create design experiences that met both user and business goals. I thrive in cross-functional agile environments, leading projects across product areas while mentoring and collaborating with teams to deliver meaningful, user-focused experiences.

Outside of work, I'm a proud dad of two, owner of two fluffy ragdoll cats, and someone who enjoys hands-on creativity in the wood shop and kitchen. I love traveling to the "Happiest Place on Earth" (land, world, and sea), exploring the Oregon coast, and spending quality time with my family.

Thanks for stopping by.