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.
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.
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.
“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.”
Use UX research techniques to generate and implement sustainable growth habits across the entire business.
Managed website updates for multiple SaaS products, while also creating all marketing materials.
Led UX and brand identity design for one of the leading landscaping firms on the American west coast.
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!
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.
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.
"Diligent and hyper knowledgeable, Cody never hesitates to address concerns when they arise - he has single-handedly solved major design issues before they had the chance to become crises. I didn't just learn about the value of UX design from Cody, I learned how to run my business more efficiently and put our customer at the core of everything we do and say. He is one of the few growth designers that I trust completely."
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
My non-traditional path to UX is what sets my approach apart. I roasted coffee for a designer-founded coffee shop, shot editorial photography, worked for a non-profit on the Navajo reservation, and even skated professionally. It was through skating that I became involved with various brands to help build their reputations through the design and copywriting on their websites. This naturally led to an (obsessive) interest in user experience design. Around the time that I began to study UX, I also became a practicing student of Zen Buddhism.
Many of the key elements of UX design - empathy, critical thinking, and challenging biases - are inherent in Zen practice. Suffice to say, UX has become an integral part of my life. Much like Zen, it acts as a lens through which all of my experiences are filtered. I feel honored to be able to create ethical, beneficial experiences that help businesses provide the best products that they can, while creating a better web for all.
At first, this winding path to design resulted in a lot of imposter syndrome, but I have come to see the value that having a diverse set of skills brings.
While I wouldn’t call it a weakness, I am still not as strong of a developer as I would like to be. At my current role, I work with a team of designers who are also fantastic developers. It is my aspiration to one day be as confident behind the terminal as I am building advanced design systems in Figma.
While not a requirement of a great designer, I do believe that having a strong grasp on basic development - especially git and front-end frameworks - makes for a much smoother collaboration between teams.
I always start by defining the problem. Analytics, heatmaps, user recordings, heuristic evaluations, interviews, usability tests, surveys. The first stage is all about discovering those revenue leaks - big and small - that are hidden within the product and the marketing that surrounds it, so we can start finding solutions to our most impactful issues. Growth design in any capacity is only as strong as your ability to generate impactful ideas - this process helps us generate practical, focused ideas and avoid wasting time on the ones that won't land.
Once we've found our issues, it is time to move onto making informed decisions based on our research. Clear fixes are implemented for any one-off changes while experiments are built and launched for anything load-bearing where we are not 100% sure of the outcome.
Based on our experiment results, we ship our winning variants and refactor anything that failed, digging further in and learning more about our users every step of the way.
At the end of this process, I usually find that the business overall is in a simplified position of clarity where everyone on the team better understands how their users behave and why. After all, design is the process of understanding a little more about our users at the end of the day than we did at the beginning.
While my work has mostly focused on websites in the past, I would like to move toward building web-based software applications. I am especially interested in working with companies that are putting social good and environmental responsibility at the forefront of what they do. I believe that in the not-too-distant-future, sustainable and energy-efficient websites will be the currency of truly conscious companies.
Aside from this, I have recently begun shifting my work towards more post-launch UX work like CRO. At MailerLite, I am currently establishing our team of UX Optimizers who run A/B tests, use UX research to refine how we talk about our offerings to use the words of our users, and talk with support as often as they can to find out what our customers need and how we can best deliver it to them with better design. To put it short - I believe in focusing on customer needs to make evidence-based decisions.
I am currently taking on interesting side projects - especially those related to enviromental and socially-responsible causes. I would love to hear from you.
