Meg Vais

Senior product designer with 15+ years designing daily tools for expert users, across financial services, analytics, and enterprise software. Five years in client-facing consulting at Lab49, designing platforms for banks and financial firms. Shipped consumer products at Redbox across native mobile, web, smart TV, and kiosk. Founded and led a User Research Center of Excellence, and designs and builds with Claude, Claude Code, and Figma Make daily.

Senior Product Designer · Lab49

Jul 2021 to Jun 2026

• Design lead on client engagements, setting design direction from discovery through delivery with product management and engineering.
• Redesigned sales CRM workflows for a financial data and analytics client, balancing what salespeople needed day to day with what management needed to see.
• Designed research note creation for a Research CRM, with an option to author inside email that supported varied user formatting and intelligent defaults.
• Designed transactional and self-service e-commerce workflows for a small business banking platform, including an account dashboard with upsell placements in key sections.
• Ran client discovery across small business banking, sales CRMs, research CRMs, cybersecurity, and central banking platforms, turning loosely defined problems into tested workflows and production-ready designs.
• Founded and led the User Research Center of Excellence, building shared research standards and tools adopted across project teams.
• Interviewed design candidates, including running 90-minute design challenges, and helped shape the hiring process.
• Specified and defended WCAG 2.1 accessibility requirements with engineering.
• Worked fully remote for five years, including with a client team nine to ten hours ahead.

Senior UX Designer · Redbox

Aug 2017 to Jul 2021

• Designed and shipped native iOS and Android apps alongside responsive web, smart TV, and a 40,000 kiosk retail network, growing total Redbox FREE customers 68%.
• Architected the On Demand storefront and streaming experience across platforms for a 39M member loyalty base, covering browse, rent, purchase, and checkout, improving Smart TV customer satisfaction by 26%.
• Designed and ran A/B tests on Roku and web, including a Roku app branding test whose results informed the Redbox FREE identity.
• Moderated usability studies across platforms, including field research at outdoor kiosks and an internal customer service tool, and delivered design recommendations from the findings.
• Defined design standards for the Redbox design system spanning mobile, web, smart TV, and kiosk.
• Launched Redbox Free Live TV on 7 platforms, earning a 2020 Redbox Product All-Star Award.

Senior UX Designer · Centro

Apr 2015 to Dec 2016

• Designed digital advertising software with product, UI design, and engineering in an agile environment.
• Planned and ran user research with internal users and enterprise customers, in collaboration with the team's dedicated UX researcher.

UX Designer · IBM

Oct 2010 to Mar 2015

• Led software design and user experience for IBM SPSS Analytic Catalyst, which ran automated analyses and explained the findings in plain language.
• Designed workflows and specifications for the predictive analytics portion of IBM Watson Analytics.
• Team lead for two designers for two years on IBM SPSS product work.
• Named inventor on two U.S. patents covering plain-language interpretation of statistical results and predictive model comparison.

UI Designer · SPSS

Apr 2008 to Oct 2010

• Investigated how researchers and statisticians plan and structure their analyses, and designed input, workflows, and resulting code in SPSS Statistics and Modeler to match.

Human Factors Research Associate · Underwriters Laboratories

Jan 2007 to Mar 2008

• Conducted literature research on user behavior and perceptual cognition in support of human factors and ergonomics engineering.

Human Factors Researcher · DaimlerChrysler

Jun 2002 to Jan 2007

• Conducted field research including ride-alongs on Sterling garbage trucks, surveys with Freightliner drivers, and interviews with Mercedes-Benz owners.
• Created early concept designs for in-vehicle infotainment screens, and tested and gave feedback on cruise control designs.
• Secured and managed human factors, HMI, usability, and ergonomics research projects across automotive brands, including driver distraction studies for passenger and commercial vehicles.
• Created concepts and evaluated prototypes and software programs.

See case studies from these roles →

• Designed and built Budget Control, a React progressive web app with a conversational agent and approval-card interactions that let the user review what the agent proposes before it acts. Case study on this site.
• Designed and built drawntodetailstudio.com, an e-commerce store for an artist that automates the flow from product details to checkout to fulfillment, replacing his Etsy store.
• Designed and coded this site with Claude Code, moving it off Squarespace with GitHub commits deploying straight to production.
• Built a pipeline of five chained Claude skills that generates sales pitch deck templates in Figma.
• Anthropic Partner Network coursework: Building with the Claude API, Introduction to Model Context Protocol, Introduction to Agent Skills.

• Interaction design
• Information architecture
• Systems thinking
• Data-dense interfaces
• E-commerce UX
• Mobile UX (iOS, Android)
• Cross-platform UX
• Design systems
• Accessibility
• User research
• Usability testing
• Field research
• A/B testing
• Journey mapping
• Prototyping
• Agile delivery
• Figma
• Figma Make
• Claude
• Claude Code

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign · MS and BS, Psychology