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Founding Designer
Dan Lutger UXC
Dan Lutger UXC
Dan Lutger UXC

With 20+ years experience as a UX Architect and Product Designer, I help startups and companies build design teams and establish product design as a company discipline. I design entire end-to-end enterprise B2B and B2C SaaS platforms. I excel at making complex web applications easy and enjoyable to use through user-centered, data-driven design thinking methods. I’m familiar with working simultaneously in multiple agile teams with lean (or even guerrilla) UX processes. I’m at my best when collaborating with sharp fellow learners and teachers. Available for contract or hire.

Let’s scroll through some examples of my work! I promise no photos of me looking at sticky notes (no offense to stickies).

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Case Study

The Future of Steel

The Future of Steel​

The way people buy steel today is mostly through disparate email threads and phone conversations. I designed the Felux Buyer Procurement Platform (BPP) for Tesla and Felux’s other most demanding members, to organize and automatically analyze all quotes received in a single place.

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Case Study

SmartDogs

SmartDogs

A brief overview of one of the last features I designed for the Label Insight platform. It also included a complementary feature design for the Consumer Brands Association platform, SmartLabel. And it helps dogs!

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Overview

Label Insight

Label Insight

I was employee #1 at Label Insight, a consumer packaged goods database and attribute insight tool that was acquired by Nielsen. For 12 years, I led UX product design, developed design as a company discipline, and created and managed the design team. This is a Figma tour of some of my designs of  major applications and features.

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Dan is a special, hard-to-find talent, and a truly fantastic person. Dan combines extreme thoughtfulness with a constant curiosity around the most up to date UX/UI fundamentals and thinking, dedication, hard work, and a collaborative, empathetic style that will transform a culture. So excited to see what’s next for him.”
Tom Slade
Product Manager / Founder
“Dan is an exceptional designer. Not only is he incredibly thoughtful and empathetic, but he excels at remaining unbiased, creative, and really listening to what people have to say. He has limitless ideas and is always looking for ways to solve customer problems. He is unwavering in his kindness, ability to keep an open mind and ability to find the silver lining in everything. I have learned so much from Dan while working with him – not only about work, but most importantly about how to be a wonderful person. He is a true gem. Any team would be lucky to have Dan, and I can assure you that customers will undoubtedly agree. He will be their biggest advocate.
Tami Checkoway
Product Leader
Scott Begin
Vice President of Strategic Partnerships
“Dan was a senior product designer at the company I work for, Label Insight, long before I joined the company years ago. He built our entire design department after many years of carrying everything design related single-handedly, supporting five fully fledged agile teams with around twenty complete single page applications shared between them. Today we have an entire design team, system, and component library that enables engineers to build entire front ends without having to write new components or even touch CSS outside of routine alignment instructions, which is a testament to him as a collaborator, but also the scalability of his design work. On top of that he’s just an all around great person – one of my favorites.”
Joshua Kleckner
Lead Engineer
Dan Lutger is an amazing, empathetic teammate and leader, and an excellent addition to any team.
Dalton Van Hatchet
CEO + Co-Founder Hatchet 🪓 Ventures
“In my opinion, designing an elegant workflow and a product is difficult. Designing the same for an industry, such as metallurgy, that is as old as time, is twice as difficult. Dan not only overcame these challenges as the founding designer at Felux, but also delivered a very elegant and a successful product. My favourite of Dan’s, is the work around “pricing analysis”. I never thought a plethora of numbers in different units could look this good on a screen! But Dan, he made it possible. Dan’s talent and eye for design is something I’ve not seen before.  Empathy is one of many Dan’s core strengths. He is always accepting of feedback from engineering. He accommodated our concerns and altered designs accordingly without compromising user experience. It was always a pleasure to talk to Dan over a coffee! I wish him nothing but the best!”
Sree Potlola
Senior Software Engineer
Seda Nesrin
Customer Success Manager CCSMP
Both my team and I have benefited greatly from collaborating with Dan to make things more amazing for our customers. Any enterprise would count itself incredibly lucky to have Dan"
Carolyn Eames
Customer Success Lead CCSMP
I would highly recommend Dan to anyone looking for a talented, empathetic, and collaborative UX designer who is passionate about creating user-friendly designs."
Scott Shirk
Senior UX-UI Designer
Alexis Yezbick
Product Manager
Zoë Han
Product Designer
Jessica Brody
Group Product Manager
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About Me

My Passions

My Passions

Culture

Good company culture is what makes hard work feel easy. Here’s the story of one of my culture projects.

Photography

I love shooting band portraits and their live performances but I also shoot for companies and events.

Music

I’ve been playing drums in bands since my early teens. Here’s some recent videos from bands I’m in.

About Me

My Deets

My Deets

I’m also a proud Chicagoan that has seen every Star Wars movie in the theater when first released. I will never refuse a hotdog. I genuinely want to hear about your favorite things and why you love them. Here’s a little more about my skills but if you got this far, why not connect?

SKILLS

Design Team & Process Building, Design Team Management, User Experience Research & Design, Mock Ups, Prototyping, User Interviews, Surveys, Competitive Analysis, Usability Testing, Design Systems, User Interface Design, Personas, Journey Maps, Workflows, Wireflows, Use Cases, Heuristic Evaluations, HTML, CSS

SOFTWARE

Figma, Sketch, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, WordPress, Miro, Balsamiq, Trello, Jira, Confluence, Notion

CERTIFICATIONS

Nielsen Norman Group
UX Management, 2019
Interaction Design, 2020

EDUCATION

University of Illinois at Chicago
B.A., Photography / Film / Electronic Visualization, 1995

RECOGNITION

University of Illinois at Chicago
Faculty Prize: Electronic Visualization, 1995
Talented Tuition Waiver, 1995

Gizmodo
This Week’s Best iPhone Apps: FoodEssentials Scanner, 2010