Designing
for complexity.
Built for humans.
Senior UX Designer and Researcher specializing in enterprise UX, AI product thinking, and the space where user behavior meets business reality.
Portfolio
Featured Work
Independent Project
First Step AI — AI Onboarding Agent
An AI onboarding agent that meets e-commerce sellers where they are. Answer 4 questions, get a specific automation recommendation built for your store.
Live product, working end to end
Backhaul Direct, LLC
ShipDeez — End-to-End Shipping Platform
End-to-end UX for a shipping startup, from brand identity to live product in 10 business days.
85% savings off retail shipping rates
Union Pacific Railroad (Remote, Contract)
Union Pacific Railroad — SAP Mass Contract Create/Change & Enterprise Modernization
Research-led design across SAP ERP workflows, UP.com redesign, and supply chain transformation over 2 years.
2,500+ line item contracts redesigned
T-Mobile (Remote + Field, Contract)
T-Mobile — Frontline Employee Tools & Billing Transparency
Billing tools, customer notification visibility, and omni-channel journey mapping across CARE and retail.
10.3M annual billing calls addressed
About
Designing for the hard problems.
I'm Chris Michalak, a Senior UX Designer and Researcher who specializes in enterprise complexity. My work lives in the space where business systems, human workflows, and organizational reality collide.
Over the past 7+ years, I've led research and design across Fortune 500 companies including T-Mobile and Union Pacific Railroad, and built products from zero at early-stage startups — most recently shipping First Step AI, an onboarding agent built on the Claude API.
7+
Years experience
3
Enterprise clients
AI
Enhanced workflow
Expertise
What I bring to the table
Product Design
End-to-end UX from discovery to delivery, across enterprise and startup contexts.
- UX Strategy
- Information Architecture
- High-Fidelity UI
- Design Systems
- Component Libraries
- Wireframing
UX Research
Mixed-methods research that turns complex data into clear design direction.
- Contextual Inquiry
- Usability Testing
- Journey Mapping
- Stakeholder Interviews
- Ethnographic Research
- Survey Design
AI & Technical
AI tools integrated across the full research and design workflow.
- AI Onboarding Patterns
- Designing for Non-Deterministic Outputs
- Trust & Transparency in AI Interfaces
- Prompt Engineering as UX Specification
- AI-Assisted Research Synthesis
- Claude API
- GPT
- Dovetail AI
- Quantum Metrics
Colleagues
What colleagues say
He did a great job owning usability testing on a product and did fantastic work helping the team build an omni-channel journey map.
What makes Chris tick is the opportunity to see the human side of the things we design: the process, the journeys, the interactions, the users' eyebrow-raising confusions, their small delights.
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Let's work together.
I'm open to UX research and product design roles at AI-native or AI-adjacent companies — especially where research depth is treated as a product lever, not a support function.