Brendan Onthank
Portfolio — Private Preview
Product and UX Designer

Human-Centered Systems Thinking
Designing complexity into clarity.

Product/UX Designer with 12+ years of experience driving product growth and user impact through rigorous design methodologies, systems thinking, and cross-functional leadership.

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Selected Work
Enterprise SaaSCustomer Communication Management

20 Years of On-Prem Complexity, Redesigned for the Cloud

A battle-tested on-premises CCM platform built over two decades for highly regulated industries needed to make the leap to SaaS — without losing the power that enterprise customers depended on.

  • Reduced navigation from 32 modules down to 9 — without removing a single core capability
  • Increased time to value by 50% through a more focused onboarding flow and consolidated workflows
  • Partnered across product, engineering, and enterprise customers to validate every structural decision before building
Case Study Coming Soon
AerospaceOperations & Tracking

Making Sense of Complexity: An Aerospace Operations Dashboard

Operations analysts needed to monitor, track, and act on high-stakes decisions in real time. The existing system showed everything but communicated nothing.

  • Conducted cognitive walkthrough sessions with analysts to identify critical decision points
  • Introduced progressive disclosure to surface urgency without overwhelming operators
  • Designed a scalable component system that reduced future build time significantly
Case Study Coming Soon
30% Safe work
Biomedical ResearchGenomics & Procurement

A Purchasing Platform Built for Scientists, Not Procurement Teams

Genetics and genomics researchers needed a procurement experience that understood their domain — complex reagents, compliance requirements, and workflows that didn't map to traditional purchasing tools.

  • Embedded with research teams to learn the science before designing the solution
  • Built a domain model that bridged researcher language and procurement logic
  • Reduced order errors through contextual validation and smart defaults
Case Study Coming Soon
Media & AdvertisingSales Enablement

Designing for the Person Selling, Not Just the Person Buying

Advertising sales teams at a major sports media company needed tools that matched the speed and complexity of their deals. The challenge was designing for an internal user with high domain expertise and zero patience for friction.

  • Shadowed sales teams through live deal cycles to understand real workflow pressures
  • Streamlined proposal generation from a multi-hour process to under 30 minutes
  • Aligned product, sales ops, and engineering through a shared journey map
Case Study Coming Soon
Advertising

Design Philosophy

Systemic Thinking

Understand the system before redesigning any part of it. Sustainable design attacks the root cause, not just the symptom.

Structural Clarity

Clarity is the hardest form of craft. Removing the unnecessary requires more effort than adding the complex.

Collaborative Alignment

Design is facilitation. The best outcomes emerge when cross-functional teams build shared understanding early.

AI-Augmented Velocity

I use AI to close the distance between a problem and a working idea. When the mechanical work moves faster, I can spend more time on the thinking that actually matters.

About

I'm a Product and UX Designer who thinks the best design decisions are the ones that serve the user and move the business.

I've designed for clinicians, engineers, analysts, and operations teams. People who live inside complex tools all day and just need them to work. What I've learned: the best decisions aren't about polish, it's about clarity.

I've led design teams, built systems from scratch, and spent a lot of time in rooms where design didn't yet have a seat at the table. I worked to change that. But I've never stopped loving the craft: a good whiteboard session, a rapid prototype, the moment a complicated flow finally clicks into something clear.

Outside of work, I'm usually outside with my family, hiking on the water, anywhere without a screen. There's something about navigating the outdoors together that I never get tired of. It keeps me grounded in a way that quietly makes me better at everything else.

Product Strategy & Vision
Expert
User Research & Synthesis
Mixed Methods
Information Architecture
Complex B2B
Interaction & Rapid Prototyping
Complex B2B
Design Systems
Built From ScratchScaled
AI Assisted Design & Development
AdvancedAdaptable
Designed World Class Experiences For:
ESPN
Disney
RTX
Lockheed Martin
EMCOR Group
Voya
CarMax
Progressive
Aetna
Fidelity
Ameriprise
Marcus
and many more...