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“One of the few designers that I trust completely”

A growth-focused
UX designer

I’ve been designing SaaS websites and products at scale for 6 years, with a focus on post-launch optimization. In short, I design experiences grounded in observing what users actually say & do to encourage measurable, sustainable business growth.

I currently design digital experiences across a range of form factors and devices at MailerLite.

2022 / website

Refreshing a product and everything that goes with it at MailerLite

Most UX case studies focus on one isolated feature. Yet growth comes not from perfection in one area but from a coherence across every facet of your product. For more than two years, I worked with dev, product, and marketing teams to design and launch new features, strategize marketing campaigns, and unify our brand voice through the first ever design system and brand guidelines created at MailerLite.

Here is a sampling of a few of the many projects that I worked on.

Role: UX design and CRO
produced at: in-house design team

I joined MailerLite to finalize a complete overhaul of the product. One of the key features that originally set ML apart from it's competitors was its drag-&-drop editor, the first in the email marketing industry.

Research told us that many users were confused by the layout of the components within the refactored builder - a point of major friction. We drastically redesigned the editor UI to solve these issues, and added a simplified AI Subject Line generator that became one of our fastest-adopted features.

Following the release of our updated product, we moved on to our 4-year-old web experience. The website update was a complete overhaul of how we marketed MailerLite.

We decided to rebuild the experience on the latest version of Statamic, a laravel-based CMS, allowing us to create a fresh codebase and rethink every interaction.

Using Statamic gave use the flexibility to create custom components that our team could use to quickly build their own pages with a visual builder. Although still at the start of my development journey, I was able to design, iterate on, and develop one of our key new Community features, the Wall of Love.

The final product is easy to update and manage for our community team members, and maintained our clean, simple-solution-first design ethos. To this date, the page is regularly updated by members of non-dev teams without issue.

Post-launch, we moved on to the next step in our growth-focused design updates. Alongside my PM, I founded the first CRO team at MailerLite. Together we created a consistent process for conducting website-visitor research and synthesizing it into experiments.

Within the first year, we found that our tiny CRO team had produced outsize gains when it came to both new signups and plan upgrades.

The final step in our redesign of MailerLite was to create guidelines that anyone could follow. In 2020, the ML team rapidly grew from a twenty person team to more than a hundred. Through the first ten years of business, the mindset around design was summed up in this stakeholder quote, "Good designers don't need brand guidelines."

When I joined the team in early 2021, it was clear that this mindset - coupled with rapid growth - had created multiple, fast-growing issues around design consistency, resulting in hundreds of hours of consistent revisions and wasted time. After interviewing multiple team members, it was discovered that different PM's even gave different responses about what the brand was, what it looked like, and who it was for.

There was no source of truth.

To solve this problem, I orchestrated large-scale meetings between marketing, design, and product to discuss, argue, and distill just who MailerLite was and why.

These conversations were used to create the first set of brand guidelines created for MailerLite. The brand book that was designed based on these guidelines is now used company-wide and is sent to all affiliates and collaborators.

While this may seem more a task for a brand designer, the same UX principles that we used to guide the direction of the product were used here; interviews with team members allowed us to create guidelines and design tools that could benefit them. Brand guidelines, and the planning around them, are as much a part of a growth strategy as any experimentation framework or analytics tool.

Some of the most important tasks of a growth designer are those that fall into the category of improving processes and streamlining design frameworks to the point that they disappear and become second-nature for the entire team.

My time at MailerLite taught me the value of being able to work cross-team to create a unified whole. After launch, we saw an immediate and consistent uptick in growth with the new MailerLite quickly outpacing the legacy version.

Although a great product comes first, growth comes from using UX insights to not only build user-focused features, but to lead everything from your copywriting to your website design. As a growth-focused UX designer, I believe it is my duty to fill many shoes. Marketing strategy one day, experimentation frameworks the next, with a bit of design systems and dev thrown in for good measure.

Brilliant products deserve brilliant marketing and equally brilliant design. This is only achieved through holistic thinking and a willingness to listen to your users.

I believe great design is ethical. Why? Because design is the practice of deliberately focusing on, and responding to, your users' needs. Those needs change. You change, too. Now let's design a growth plan that doesn't feel deceitful and make the internet just a little bit better through honesty and empathy.

Email me about a project.

Consulting with the MailerLite team in Istanbul.

Cody is my favorite UX designer that I have worked with. A great design thinker, combining creativity, business strategy and attention to detail, all in one. What's also great about Cody is his mannerism on receiving feedback and turning this into solutions one can actually work with - he's incredible with deadlines and honest with what can and cannot work.”

Lay Kuen Yee
Community Project Manager @ MailerLite

Recent years

UX Designer & CRO

mailerlite - current

Use UX research techniques to generate and implement sustainable growth habits across the entire business.

Visual Designer

The Remote Company - 2020

Managed website updates for multiple SaaS products, while also creating all marketing materials.

UX Designer

Pacific Outdoor Living - 2019

Led UX and brand identity design for one of the leading landscaping firms on the American west coast.

download my cv

Designers don't code

The better you understand code, the easier it is to collaborate. I work daily in HTML and CSS to maintain multiple git-based Statamic CMS websites. Coding my own designs is something of a passion for me, including this very website, quirks and all!

Like certifications?

Certifications are how I construe my obsession for learning all things UX. In that spirit, I have completed the Official Google UX Cert as well as multiple IxDF Certs. I am currently enrolled in the Growth Design School.

More than UX

Human design practices mean a better, more efficient and ethical web for everyone. In that regard, I designed and built this website to follow the latest low-energy criteria. Sustainable web design is quickly becoming a cornerstone of my practice.

Reviews

“Cody's quality design work speaks for itself, but what is truly impressive is his ability to use data and testing to design for the end user. He has great design instincts, while still always being open to exploring new solutions.”

Jonas Fischer

marcom @ 1000 email ideas

“Cody's technical and creative skills were invaluable during our collaboration on MailerSend and MailerCheck, where we worked together for 2+ years, providing usable and polished designs for our products.”

Agathe Brusset

pm @ mailersend

“Usability, performance and sustainability are only a few of the concerns Cody brings to the table when solving design problems. His outstanding communication skills make working with Cody stress-free.”

Ramon Quero

Designer @ MailerLite

Common questions

Interested in working together on a UX or CRO project?

I am currently taking on interesting side projects - especially those related to enviromental and socially-responsible causes. I would love to hear from you.