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Jonathan Howe

Jonathan Howe

Product Design Leader

I'm a team leader experienced in both app development and e-Commerce. I balance customer needs with business objectives. I take product from ideation through implementation with a modern, AI-powered approach. Drawing from years of hands-on UX design, programming, and product management experience, I build teams people love to join, and products people love to use.

Multiple Industries
Medical & Insurance Automotive Productivity Software
Broad Responsibilities
UX / UI Design User Research Product Management Design Ops AI Adoption
Singular Focus
Grow the business by delighting customers

Case Studies

Selected Work

Beginly Health

Head of Product
Beginly jobs dashboard showing matched physician roles with salary ranges

What we made

  • Job matching platform for physicians and employers to solve medical recruitment problems
  • Functional prototypes built directly in Claude Code
  • Mobile-first job browsing app
  • Design system spanning clinician and employer experiences across web and mobile
Beginly job detail page with location map and Express interest action

My role

  • Design direction
  • Product strategy
  • Hands-on design & prototyping

Every screen started as a Claude Code prototype. We reviewed, refined, and shipped using the same toolset.

Key learnings

Functional prototypes get better team feedback than static comps. We no longer have to be frugal with prototyping resources, animations, or dynamic layouts.

Claude Code makes rich prototypes fast, letting one person take an idea from sketch to a working, real-data prototype in a single sitting.

Design direction matters more than ever. Claude can create weak UI that looks polished at first glance.

Journi

Director of User Experience · Cambia Health Solutions
Journi mobile app screens

What we made

  • Mobile app helping customers navigate their family's health
  • Consolidated health records
  • Real-time chat with nurses & health concierge services
  • AI-based recommendations for saving money on medications
  • Bill analysis for errant charges, with advice for fixing them
  • A companion employer dashboard
Full case study: Bill inspection & pay →
Customer research workshop with sticky notes

My role

  • Design direction
  • Resourcing and project planning
  • Product management

We ran workshops to identify customer pain points and prioritize them, then refined how Design partnered with Engineering & Product.

Key learnings

Cross-functional design leadership lands best paired with rigorous usability research, not vision alone.

Customer journeys are only as strong as the qualitative and quantitative research behind them.

Ideation workshops and design sprints turn synthesized insight into testable prototypes, fast.

Jaguar Land Rover

UX Team Manager
Land Rover Defender in-vehicle infotainment

Future In-Vehicle Infotainment

  • UX design for cross-brand in-car digital experience
  • Prototype built in Qt, running in a concept car
  • Mobile companion experiences
  • "PIVI Pro" launched in the 2020 Land Rover Defender to award wins and favorable reviews
Heuristic evaluation of Validated, a mobile app from one of the 15 startups in the JLR Tech Incubator, showing current and suggested zero-balance screens

JLR Tech Incubator

  • Design support for 15 different startups
  • Branding packages
  • Heuristic evaluations and recommendations

Design principles set during discovery became the target for both design and ways of working. User testing ran on a car simulator in the lab.

Land Rover heritage showroom
Key learnings

Consistent in-vehicle experiences need shared user stories and specs across a 13-person team, not just individual craft.

Automotive earns trust incrementally: PIVI Pro's "massive improvement" (Car & Driver) came from raising ratings 6.5 to 8.2, not reinvention.

Four-year product life-cycles mean design principles have to outlast any single release.

Blue Lantern Health

VP, Product & UX
HealthInsurance.com plan comparison tool

HealthInsurance.com

  • Digital marketplace for Medicare Advantage and short-term health insurance
  • Plan comparison tool powered by a personalization engine
  • Tie-ins with call center agents for online-to-phone handoffs
  • Learning Center article database with site-wide search
  • Consolidated 11 different brands and subsites into one web presence
Full case study: Plan Selection Tool →
HealthInsurance.com finances screen

My role

  • Full ownership of UX/UI Design
  • Product management, including Engineering priorities and workflow
  • SEO

Built a design system on Tailwind components with older viewers and accessibility specifically in mind.

Key learnings

Human-centered design only sticks when it's balanced against real business constraints, not run apart from them.

Highly regulated industries need close partnerships with legal and compliance, not a gatekeeper/rubber-stamp model.

AI is a force multiplier for content and tooling, not a strategy substitute: it drove a 300% organic search lift in 3 months.

Agile iteration across Design, Engineering, and Product pays off even in complex, regulated environments.

Microsoft

Senior UX Manager
Skype threaded conversation prototype

Skype Threading

  • UX spec & recommendation on threading and liking for Skype conversations
  • Prototype enabling threaded conversations across multiple people and devices

Started with a "post-it prototype" (each note an instant message, each column a person's view) before building a working conversation prototype.

Lync for Windows Store app

Lync for Windows Store

  • XAML-based Lync application with a C++ layer
  • One of only two Office store apps built for the Windows 8 launch
  • Personally coded High Contrast Mode support at the last minute when no engineering time was allocated
Lync Attendant Console interface

Lync Attendant Console

  • Full-screen client for the receptionist / switchboard operator
  • One of Microsoft's first WPF applications
  • Designed for high call volume: multitasking, transfers, switchboard views
Lync Desktop Phone simulation

Lync Desktop Phone

  • Embedded UI in a phone for standalone Lync use
  • Usability lab prototype on a touch screen simulating pre-release hardware

Replaced an enormous interaction spreadsheet with a full working simulation: tested, refined, and retested with better results each round.

Key learnings

Small teams (6 people) can ship category-defining products when prototyping and production are tightly integrated.

Category-defining tools grow out of unglamorous integration work: Teams' precursors were Communicator, Lync, and Skype.

Long-running platforms reward design continuity across many product generations over one-off wins.

Get in touch

Let's talk about product & design

Everything is changing by the week. I can help you navigate. Let's incorporate AI in your product design workflow while still focusing on user needs and design craft.