UX, Design & Content Executive

Janine
Yagielski

20+ years leading research, digital product strategy and design across logistics, financial services, commerce and media.

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Skills

UX Research Strategy Voice & Tone Content Strategy Design Systems Information Architecture Practice Building UX Writing Standards Agile Collaboration Usability Testing Interaction Design Digital Product Strategy Content Localization Cross-Functional Leadership

Brands I’ve worked with: DHLWegmansKodakFirst NiagaraCNN.comMTV Networks

Software Designed:

Video Editing HR Management Retail Online Banking International Shipment Creation

B2B & Transportation Standard of Excellence

DHL.com

2022

Best of the Web, Financial Services

First Niagara Bank

2013

Standard of Excellence, Site Redesign

First Niagara Bank

2012

Peabody Award — Hurricane Katrina

CNN.com

2005

National Press Foundation Online Excellence

CNN.com

2004

Managing Director, User Experience

Rivet CX Group

2017 – PresentRochester, NY

Build and evolve UX and content design practices across multiple organizations, from early-stage adoption to enterprise-scale maturity.
Define product vision, build roadmaps, prioritize features, and validate opportunities by ensuring the customer voice is embedded throughout the product lifecycle.
Develop and execute generative and evaluative research; present to executive leaders.
Conceive and implement content strategy and content design standards.
Lead cross-functional team UX team (designers, researchers, writers and developers) across multiple concurrent workstreams.
Direct the creation of high-fidelity prototypes for approval and user testing.

Key Engagements

DHL.com — Unified website for DHL business units, universal tracking & customer service
- Led UX research, design and content strategy for the re-envisioned responsive site.
- Developed and executed content upgrade for 150+ localized country editions.
- Directed development of accessible visual design system and React prototype.
- Managed concept and usability testing of designs and functional prototypes.
- Developed operating model and training for site teams, including UX writing standards.
DHL Express — DHL’s international courier delivery service, ~€25B in annual revenue
- Directed data-informed UX requirements and designs for new Guest Shipping application and My DHL Express, a reimagined digital product launching in 2026.
DHL Freight — DHL’s European Road Freight Division
- Produced the initial product design for the My DHL Freight shipment creation and management application; provided ongoing UX support for feature envisioning.
Clipsmash — Downloadable video editing digital product, developed by Rivet CX
- Developed user experience and brand strategy; collaborated with design, engineering and marketing through full product build and launch.

Senior UX Design Consultant

Wegmans Food Markets

2015 – 2017Rochester, NY

Provided research-based strategic direction for major Mobile App redesign; directed design agency during full website overhaul.
Authored majority of user stories for offshore Agile development team; contributed to UX for online grocery delivery launch with Instacart.
Conceived and designed online cake ordering system; provided UX consulting across pharmacy and restaurant teams.
Consultant, moved to employee.

Vice President, User Experience

First Niagara Bank

2011 – 2015Buffalo, NY

Executive leadership role defining digital vision and securing resource support for a Digital Improvement Plan to modernize experiences across the digital portfolio.
Relaunched the sales website in six months — expanding self-service capabilities and establishing new UX writing and navigation standards.
Defined and executed an Online Account Opening improvement plan that doubled conversion rate.
Introduced User Experience practice to Online Banking product development and defined future state for Mobile Banking with a combination of external resources and internal team of four; implemented customer satisfaction tracking.
Managed internal team of four and external design team of six.

Account Director, Client Services Lead

Catalyst

2007 – 2011Rochester, NY

Designed and managed multi-channel marketing strategies for clients including Goodyear, Bausch & Lomb, Aetna and AAA.
Authored brand experience strategy, business requirements and UX specifications.
Directed client interaction with functional groups, including design/creative, technology and production.
Collaborated with Data Analytics to deliver insights. Extensive multivariate, A/B testing.
Managed client timelines and budgets to grow agency revenue and profitability.

Senior Product Manager

MTV Networks

2006New York, NY

Conceived and designed web-based consumer service and internal management tools for VH1.com.
Introduced user experience practices to the product development team, authoring concept statements, functional treatments, wireframes, information architectures, business requirements, use cases and user interface design specifications.
Directed Search Engine Optimization program.
Coordinated cross-functional communications with technical and business teams.

Head of Special Projects & UX Lead

CNN.com

1995 – 2005Atlanta, GA & New York, NY

Editorial & Content Leadership

Directed content, creative, and technical production for all CNN.com Special Reports — including September 11, Hurricane Katrina, Iraq War, and Elections.
Managed high-performing, full-time creative, and technical staff of 10.
Editorial titles include: Associate Producer, Writer, Producer, Senior Producer.

UX Design & Research

Directed cross-discipline (design, technology and marketing) teams on major site-wide initiatives, including site redesigns.
Introduced wireframes, site maps and formal UX documentation practices.
Coordinated research, hired and collaborated with Adaptive Path to develop user personas and leveraged feedback for site-wide product development.
Directed and designed UX for election real-time results experience, including first county-level map visualization.

CNN.com received 50+ awards, 1998–2005

Logistics · Consumer

DHL Express — Guest Shipping Application

Reimagine the shipment creation workflow to improve conversion, optimizing a complex process for novice shippers across 200+ countries.

UX ResearchWorkflow DesignAI IntegrationReact Prototype

Logistics · Enterprise

DHL.com — Global UX Unification

Redesign a global logistics giant’s web presence across 250 localized country editions with a unified responsive design, content and experience system.

UX ResearchContent StrategyDesign SystemLocalization

Financial Services · Consumer & Business

First Niagara — Digital Transformation

Building a UX practice from the ground up inside a regional bank, doubling online account opening conversion rates and relaunching the digital portfolio.

Practice BuildingConversion OptimizationMobile Banking

Retail · Consumer

Wegmans — Mobile Application & Online Commerce

Strategic UX leadership for a major mobile app redesign, full website overhaul, online cake ordering, and the launch of grocery delivery with Instacart.

Mobile UXAgileeCommerceUX Specifications

Media · Editorial

CNN.com — Becoming a UX Person

A decade building UX and editorial practices at one of the internet’s first great news properties — before “UX” was a job title.

Information ArchitectureUser PersonasData VisualizationEditorial

DHL Express · 2025

Reimagining International Shipping
for Novice Shippers

An accelerated design project that produced a streamlined, modern shipping experience for unauthenticated users — launching worldwide in 2026.

My Role

UX & Content Strategy Leadership

Industry

Global Logistics

Scope

Research · Workflow · Requirements · UX Design · Testing

Launching

Worldwide 2026

The Context

In early 2025, we were brought in to reconceive the Guest Shipping application for DHL Express. Having already conducted heuristic and usability testing on the existing Ship Now application, we came in with a clear-eyed view of where it was failing people — and a strong foundation to build from.

The target user: low-volume, novice shippers navigating international customs for the first time. A large audience, and one the existing application wasn’t designed for.

The Challenge

International shipping is genuinely complex — customs regulations vary by shipment type, value, contents, and origin/destination combination across 220 countries. The back-end systems weren’t changing, so the design had to work within real system constraints while feeling simple to the person on the other side of the screen.

Two points of failure dominated the existing experience: address entry and customs invoice creation. Both needed to be solved.

The Approach

We unified analytics and sales data to define the most valuable user profiles and use cases, then built guiding principles around them:

Clarify that shipping is a process, not a single action
Reduce friction at the start of the flow
Show a complete, consolidated view of pricing upfront
Set clearer expectations for required data and service details
Use smart defaults and remove duplication to simplify inputs
Add contextual help where people actually get stuck
Don’t let edge cases degrade the core experience

On the design side, we sequenced questions to make the application progressively smarter — so the right fields appeared at the right time, and users never felt lost. We also designed an AI assistant to guide users through customs invoice creation, directly targeting the second-biggest drop-off point in the current flow.

To support the full range of international use cases, we built a high-fidelity, responsive React prototype with a scenario configurator that simulated thousands of real-life shipping combinations. A robust Figma design system, based on DHL’s corporate UI library, ensured every component was production-ready.

Usability Testing

The prototype was tested with users across multiple countries on both mobile and desktop. Results were strong enough to move the new design directly into development.

What’s Next

The new application will roll out to pilot countries in early 2026 before fully replacing Ship Now worldwide.

DHL.com · 2021 – 2024

Transforming DHL.com Into
a Scalable Global Platform

A three-year content and design renovation rebuilt 250 local editions of DHL.com into a unified, customer-first sales and support experience.

My Role

UX & Content Strategy Leadership

Industry

Global Logistics

Scope

Research · Design · Content

Award

B2B & Transportation Standard of Excellence, 2022

The Context

With nearly 900 million unique visitors a year, DHL.com serves prospects, customers, and shippers across 220 countries — spanning every DHL business unit. Whether someone arrives directly or lands from a Google search, they need to find what they’re looking for quickly. For years, that wasn’t happening consistently.

Starting in 2018, our team was brought in by DHL’s Digital Customer Interactions (DCI) group to build a customer-first practice and improve key journeys. By 2021, surveys, analytics, SEO audits, and usability testing all pointed to the same conclusion: incremental fixes weren’t enough. A larger transformation was needed.

The Challenge

The goal was to create a unified, responsive DHL.com that felt like a single, coherent brand while serving the distinct needs of B2B customers, consumers, and internal operators across 150+ markets.

Building a content and design system that could scale across 150+ countries while remaining locally relevant required a deep understanding of both the business architecture and the humans using it.

“The customer needs simplicity!”— Visitor from the UK, 2020

The Approach

Content Design
We started with a purge. A careful audit revealed that roughly 80% of existing pages were underperforming or unnecessary. Removing them let us rebuild a streamlined information architecture with cleaner navigation and copy written with SEO intentionality throughout.

Experience Design
For the visual layer, we focused on patterns and consistency — evolving DHL’s brand standards into a design system that was approachable, accessible and unmistakably DHL. We piloted the new experience in select countries first, measured results, then prepared for the hard part.

Rollout
Rolling out a redesign across 250 country sites (English and local languages) — while the site stays live — is like changing tires at highway speed. Working with DHL’s in-house technical teams, we built a wave-based rollout plan: six countries in the first wave, growing to 15+ per wave by 2024. Each country received a localized package built from a master design, with new pages created where needed.

By the end: 250 sites. 25 business unit configurations. 16,000 pages. 44 languages.

Results

Key business results include:

+38% organic visits from Google search
+60,000 new DHL Express visits per month
+87% search traffic to DHL Freight quotation tools
+77% awareness of DHL Supply Chain’s product offering
New lead generation initiatives drove measurable revenue in 2022

Before & After

Drag the handle to compare the old DHL.com with the redesigned experience.

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Before After

Recognition

The project earned the B2B & Transportation Standard of Excellence Award in 2022 — a reflection of both the quality of the experience and the systems built to sustain it.

View the High Fidelity Prototype →

If you receive the Google dangerous site page, please continue to the site. This often happens with our live client-facing prototypes.

Deliverables

Research-based UX approach and design strategy
Site traffic and SEO audit results
Master country classification spreadsheet defining site versioning
Information architecture for each site version
Component design styleguide and UI library
Functional site prototype developed in Angular
Site configuration instructions for each country
Copy decks with detailed page-by-page instructions
Image tracking instructions
Educational documentation for internal training portal

UX Approach Canvas

Configurable Styleguide

Site Version IA

Publishing Guidelines

First Niagara Bank · 2011 – 2015

Building a UX Practice
Inside a Regional Bank

Establishing a UX discipline from scratch — and delivering measurable business impact — as VP of User Experience.

My Role

VP, User Experience

Industry

Financial Services

Scope

Practice Building · Digital Portfolio

Awards

Best of Web (2013) · Standard of Excellence (2012)

The Context

First Niagara was a fast-growing regional bank with a highly-rated branch experience and a digital presence that hadn’t kept pace. The online products were largely off-the-shelf, configured by technology teams, and there was no culture of studying user behavior or acting on it.

With a major acquisition of HSBC branches bringing in customers with higher expectations, the gap between the branch experience and the digital one became impossible to ignore.

The Approach

Working with the CMO, we developed a Digital Improvement Plan to modernize the bank’s entire digital portfolio — securing executive sponsorship and resource investment. Core to this improvement plan was the Digital Vision, ensuring user-centricity was prioritized.

We empower you to thrive — by humanizing every aspect of the technology experience, infusing it with First Niagara’s passion, integrity and expertise.

Rather than tackle the portfolio sequentially, we ran parallel workstreams — Build, Manage, and Market — united by a common UX practice and research process. This gave us specialization without losing consistency across touchpoints.

Build: Leveraging agency resources, I relaunched the sales website in six months, establishing new UX writing and navigation standards and expanding self-service capabilities. Then we turned to the core banking products: launching Mobile Banking, redesigning Retail Online Banking, and rebuilding Online Account Opening.

Manage: With our growing in-house team I focused on incremental improvement across existing products — launching a ForeSee customer satisfaction survey, improving analytics tracking, launching Remote Deposit Capture, and building a Guided Buying tool.

Market: Collaborating with the in-house and agency marketing teams, I supported multi-channel acquisition campaigns across credit card, HELOC, and CD products.

A Closer Look: Online Account Opening

When I joined, First Niagara was using the Andera platform with a 2.4% conversion rate — the worst on the platform. During the next 20 months, we tested and iterated, moving the rate up meaningfully. But we were still losing more qualified starts than we were converting.

So we started over. We built a custom, user-centered application from scratch. At launch, it converted more than 60% of quality starts.

Deposit OAO Quality Start to Completion Ratio chart

Quality Start to Completion Ratio, Jan 2012 – Sep 2013

Awards

Best of the Web, Financial Services — 2013
Standard of Excellence, Site Redesign — 2012

Wegmans · 2015 – 2017

Introducing UX Practices
to the Wegmans Digital Team

Bringing structure, rigor, and user-centricity to a beloved regional grocery brand navigating a major digital expansion.

My Role

Senior UX Design Consultant

Industry

Retail / Grocery

Scope

Mobile · eCommerce · Agile

Collaboration

Instacart

The Context

Wegmans is one of the most customer-loyal grocery brands in the country — and one of the best places to work. They hire young and promote from within, which builds extraordinary employee loyalty. But deep institutional culture can also mean limited exposure to how digital practices are evolving elsewhere.

Headquartered locally and committed to in-person collaboration, I had a rare opportunity to work closely with this family-owned organization and help modernize how they approached digital experience.

The Challenge

When I joined, design decisions were largely communicated through conversations rather than documentation. Requirements were passed to external partners verbally, with little written record to help cross-functional teams plan, validate, or align. The result was ambiguity — and ambiguity in digital development is expensive.

My goal was to introduce UX structure and rigor, and shift the team from developer-driven decisions to data-informed ones.

Key Projects

Website and App Redesign
A full redesign alongside an Adobe tech stack implementation.

Defined the experience strategy
Managed external visual design resources
Wrote user stories for the Agile development team
Collaborated on CMS implementation and content loading

Cakes Ordering System
A deceptively complex project — custom cake ordering requires careful UX for both the customer placing the order and the bakery staff fulfilling it.

Defined the experience strategy
Collaborated with operations on the internal management application
Authored the detailed specification for the external development team

Additional Projects
Provided additional UX leadership to the following projects and properties.

Instacart integration
Point of sale terminal design
Personal Shopping
Pharmacy and Restaurant microsites

View Digital Refresh User Experience Approach →

UX strategy document developed to guide the WMA Fall 2015 Refresh.

Deliverables

UX strategy and approach documents defining user needs, business objectives, measurement targets, and guiding principles
Comprehensive Sketch files
Full UX specification documents for developers and QA teams
User stories for Agile development teams
Detailed specification for external development team

Unified Ordering Concept

Ordering System Specs

Wegmans Cake Ordering — Step 2 wireframe

CNN.com · 1995 – 2005

Becoming a UX Person

How a decade inside one of the internet’s first great news sites led me to user experience — before “UX” was a job title.

My Role

Head of Special Projects & UX Lead

Industry

News / Media

Scope

Editorial · IA · Research · Data Viz

Awards

Peabody (2005) · NPF Excellence (2004) · OJA (2001)

The Context

I interviewed at CNN.com the day it launched in August 1995. The interviewer sat me down at a computer, then left to put out launch fires. When he came back we had about 15 minutes, and I left not knowing what to think. They brought me back a few days later and hired me a few months after that. I had no idea, packing my Ford Taurus for the drive to Atlanta, that I was heading toward the most transformative experience of my career.

There was no UX in 1995. We were all learning and experimenting every day.

The Work

I started as an Associate Producer, then moved to AllPolitics — a joint venture with TIME Magazine — before advancing to Producer and Senior Producer. We wrote stories without bylines. We invented features: the Breaking News Banner, early versions of the blog, real-time election results visualizations. We pioneered streaming video. We learned how to cover news at the speed of digital.

After the dot-com bubble burst and CNN reorganized in 2001, I joined the CNN.com senior management team running Special Reports. My team managed three categories: breaking news, planned sponsor-friendly specials, and obituaries. I was in the newsroom on 9/11 when the site went down — we stripped it back to a single image and text to handle the load.

The stories we covered in that era were defining ones: September 11, War in Afghanistan, War in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina.

Finding UX

The editorial side of CNN.com hadn’t yet developed a product management practice, so I was also running large site-wide Special Projects — section launches, full site redesigns, internal analytics tools. I was producing information architectures and product specifications before I really understood those were formal development artifacts.

After the 2004 Election, we set out to redesign the entire site and I authored a comprehensive process starting with a formal research phase. We needed external help and I found Adaptive Path. After meeting Jesse James Garrett — who had just published Elements of User Experience — and Dan Saffer, the decision was easy.

Working with Adaptive Path was like someone turned on the lights. We conducted our first remote user interviews and ethnographic testing, and developed CNN.com’s first set of user personas. We finally had a framework to counter executives who assumed everyone wanted the features they did.

That project was my introduction to formal User Experience. The burnout of covering breaking news was real — but the puzzle of understanding human behavior and keeping pace with digital change was fascinating. I was a UX person.

Recognition

CNN.com earned more than 50 awards between 1998 and 2005, including:

Peabody Award — Hurricane Katrina and Aftermath, 2005
National Press Foundation Award — Online Excellence, 2004
Online Journalism Award — Special Honor, September 11 Coverage, 2001
Headliner Awards — “America Votes” and “Tsunami” Special Reports
Webby Awards — AllPolitics, 1998; CNN.com, 1999

"I think part of the human condition is that we sense care. And sometimes it's easier to realize you sense carelessness. We're surrounded by our manufactured environment, and so much of it testifies to a complete lack of care. That's not about your attitude towards an object — it's about your attitude to each other."
— Jony Ive

I’m a UX executive with more than 20 years of experience helping organizations understand their customers and build products people actually want to use. I’ve worked across industries that couldn’t be more different — global logistics, financial services, retail grocery, broadcast news — and what connects all of it is a commitment to putting the customer’s voice at the center of every decision.

I started working online at CNN.com in 1995, when the web was still figuring itself out, and I’ve been building digital experiences ever since. That career arc has given me something rare: I know what it’s like to introduce UX to an organization for the first time, to build a practice from scratch, to get executives to invest in research before they fully believed in it — and to deliver the results that earn the next conversation.

Through Rivet CX Group, I’ve spent the last several years as a Managing Director embedded in large enterprises — most notably leading UX across DHL’s global web presence across more than 150 country editions. I’ve loved that work. And as my two children approach the end of high school — both serious ballet dancers pursuing their own careers — I’m ready to shift my energy toward an in-house leadership role where I can go deeper, build a team, and be part of a product culture for the long term.

I believe great UX starts at the intersection of business need and user need. But crafting an exceptional experience takes empathy, rigor, and craft. Research without design action is wasted, and design without research is guessing. I care deeply about content and communication — perhaps more than most UX leaders — because I know how much words, images, and motion shape experience. And I believe the best UX teams are ones where collaboration is genuine and ownership is shared. What we produce by actively discussing and iterating together is better than what any of us can produce alone.

I’m based in Rochester, NY, and open to fully remote, hybrid, or relocation for the right position.

Get in Touch

Let's Talk

I'm actively exploring VP and Director-level UX and Design roles. If you're building something and want to talk, I'd love to hear from you.

Email

janine.yagielski@gmail.com

Phone

917-453-1536

linkedin.com/in/janineyagielski

Location

Rochester, NY

Open to relocation

Janine
Yagielski

Resume

Case Studies

Reimagining International Shipping
for Novice Shippers

Transforming DHL.com Into
a Scalable Global Platform

Building a UX Practice
Inside a Regional Bank

Introducing UX Practices
to the Wegmans Digital Team

Becoming a UX Person

A Human-Centered Practitioner

What I’m looking for

My superpower

Outside of work

Let's Talk

JanineYagielski

Resume

Case Studies

Reimagining International Shippingfor Novice Shippers

Transforming DHL.com Intoa Scalable Global Platform

Building a UX PracticeInside a Regional Bank

Introducing UX Practicesto the Wegmans Digital Team

Becoming a UX Person

A Human-Centered Practitioner

What I’m looking for

My superpower

Outside of work

Let's Talk

Janine
Yagielski

Reimagining International Shipping
for Novice Shippers

Transforming DHL.com Into
a Scalable Global Platform

Building a UX Practice
Inside a Regional Bank

Introducing UX Practices
to the Wegmans Digital Team