Senior UX Designer

Turning messy systems into UX that just makes sense.

I work with enterprise teams stuck on a system that's gotten too complex to see clearly from the inside. I map the mess, shape the structure, and design for how people actually use it.

View the work How I think

Recent impact

364,000+ visits in 90 daysGlobal employee travel hub→Approved and scaled into a production platformOperational investigation platform→~90% rated pilot value high or very highManager enablement & engagement→

Enterprise contexts I've worked across

Global Employee ServicesEnterprise PlatformsProduction Planning & OperationsHR & Legal SystemsCross-Functional ReportingEngineering & Technical Tools

How I approach complexity

Atomic Thinking

Every product I work on breaks down into three forces: purpose, structure, and behavior. Once you can see how those three actually relate, a messy system stops being messy. It just makes sense. This isn't some industry-standard framework, by the way. It's just the lens I've built up from years of untangling complex products.

Proton — Product Goals & Strategy

Where every project starts

Why the product exists, who it's for, and what outcome actually matters. This is always where I start. You can't design the right thing until you know what “right” means.

Neutron — Structure & Systems

Where complexity gets organized

Information architecture, flows, hierarchy, scalable patterns: basically, turning a tangle of complexity into something a team can actually navigate without getting lost.

Electron — User Behavior

Where design meets reality

How people actually think, decide, and move through a product. This is where all that strategy and structure either holds up in the real world or falls apart.

Selected work

Case studies in turning enterprise complexity into clarity

Different problems, same approach: start with how people actually work.

The enterprise case studies are de-identified to protect confidential and proprietary information; this site's own case study isn't. Process and outcomes below are accurately represented.

Reorganized a fragmented global travel experience into one task-oriented service

Global employee travel service · Information architecture & service design

Problem

The travel site reflected how content was owned and stored, not how employees actually completed travel tasks. Scattered guidance, outdated pages, and generic support channels left employees without a dependable starting point before, during, or after a trip.

Approach

I audited the existing content and ecosystem, then built a task-oriented information architecture around real travel stages: planning, approvals, booking, traveling, completing travel, and getting support. I also designed the wireframes and support workflows for the resulting hub.

Result

The redesigned hub recorded more than 364,000 visits in its first 90 days. Its new guided booking section alone drew over 6,000 visits and became the most-used part of the hub.

364,000+ visits in 90 daysView case study →

Established the UX foundation for an enterprise investigation platform, from zero

Operational investigation platform · Enterprise workflow transformation

Problem

A global operational team was investigating events and assembling reports across spreadsheets, email, local trackers, and disconnected channels. Version conflicts, duplicate work, and unclear ownership were the norm.

Approach

I mapped the reporting and investigation workflow, reframed it into three phases (Describe, Build, Finalize), and designed the full high-fidelity interface and reusable component system on top of it. Then I validated the working prototype with product owners and users.

Result

The design was approved and moved into development. The platform later operated as a production solution, and a later adoption update showed real usage across participating regions. That's a platform-level signal, not proof my original design drove it.

Approved and scaled into a production platformView case study →

Turned a fractured employee-engagement debate into one shared framework and design direction

Manager enablement & employee engagement · Strategy & facilitation

Problem

A people organization wanted to reduce the burden on managers and improve how they engaged their teams, but HR information was scattered across systems and stakeholders didn't agree on what meaningful engagement even meant.

Approach

I designed and facilitated a Design Thinking process (Creative Matrix, affinity synthesis, prioritization voting) that converged the group on four engagement pillars, then designed the manager-facing experience concepts that carried that framework into an actual product direction.

Result

The four pillars structured later engagement initiatives and manager playbook work. A later pilot reported feedback from roughly 1,000 managers, with about 90% rating both the value and the data quality high or very high.

~90% rated pilot value high or very highView case study →

Research only — no design phase

Diagnosed why adoption varied across an enterprise product a year after launch

Enterprise product adoption research · Evaluative UX research

Problem

An enterprise product had been deployed for roughly a year, but the organization couldn't explain why adoption varied so much. Deployment numbers alone said nothing about workflow fit, integration gaps, or where the product was actually delivering value.

Approach

I framed and led an evaluative research study (interviews across six functional roles, thematic synthesis, executive shareout) focused on real-world usage rather than a feature wish list. This was a research and strategy engagement; the resulting design work sat with a separate product team.

Result

The research surfaced a consistent set of adoption barriers: manual and unscalable work, unclear product value, integration and workflow gaps, UX friction, weak system feedback, and limited usage analytics. I translated them into prioritized recommendations for stakeholders.

Strategic, qualitative findings; no design phase in this engagementView case study →

Personal project — fully public

Designed, built, and shipped this entire site myself, with Claude as an agentic dev partner

uxtom.me · Brand design, AI-directed development & deployment

Problem

I wanted one project that showed the full range of how I work, end to end — brand identity, real product decisions, working code, and an actual deployment — instead of splitting each part across separate examples.

Approach

I designed the brand identity and visual system in Illustrator and Photoshop, then directed Claude as an agentic coding partner to scaffold and build the production site in Next.js and TypeScript. I built custom Claude skills to encode my brand and content standards into the workflow, and connected Figma through MCP to keep design and code working from the same source. I wrote and structured all the real content myself, reviewed and corrected the implementation across dozens of rounds, set up version control in GitHub, and I'm handling deployment through HostGator.

Result

What's live here is the proof itself: real brand work, a real production codebase, and content that's been reviewed and corrected against my own voice and standards through the whole process, not accepted as a first draft.

Built and directed end-to-end, brand to deploymentView case study →

Thomas Martinez

Senior UX Designer

LUMA Institute
Certified Practitioner

See full résumé →

About

Most complex problems aren't actually complex. They're just unorganized. Give me enough time with a messy system and I can usually find the handful of decisions that would make the whole thing make sense.

I've been doing this for 8+ years, mostly at SLB, working through high-complexity workflows in the energy sector.

There's a pattern I keep running into: someone asks for something that sounds simple, like "just redesign this screen," and it turns out there's a much bigger workflow or alignment problem hiding underneath it. That's usually when I get called in. Something's gotten too complex for the team to see clearly from the inside, and someone needs to map it out, reframe it, and build a model everyone can actually work from.

In practice, that means moving fluidly between strategy, research, and execution without losing the thread, and staying calm enough under the ambiguity that the people around me can focus on solving the actual problem instead of managing me.

Where I help

What I help with

Enterprise UX & complex systems design

AI-assisted research, prototyping & future-state exploration

UX research & qualitative synthesis

Information architecture & workflow modeling

Product strategy & requirements discovery

Design systems & reusable infrastructure

Stakeholder facilitation & cross-functional alignment

Mentoring, governance & design practice leadership

Beyond the product

How I lead beyond the product

This shows up in the work, but also in how a team makes decisions after I've been in the room.

Established UX operating standards

I put together an end-to-end UX process for the team early on: standard project phases, research and validation checkpoints, shared file conventions, plus centralized project spaces so decisions, feedback, and history didn't just disappear. More recently, that's grown into standardizing how UX, AI tooling, and the portfolio/project teams work together.

Influenced platform and technical direction

Across many projects over the years, working closely with stakeholders and looking at the broader product and portfolio, not just the screen in front of me, has repeatedly surfaced platform and technical direction changes worth making. One example: digging into the UX on a reporting workflow showed that repetitive one-at-a-time work should be a batch process instead, which fed directly into picking a model-driven application approach that fit the complex, relational data far better.

Led the case for modern design tooling

I was the reason SLB first moved from Sketch to Figma as its UX design standard: evaluated the fragmented tool stack against a proper collaborative design platform, laid out the productivity and risk tradeoffs, then helped train people and support the team as adoption grew.

Mentored designers beyond my own projects

This year, I've continuously supported other designers with how I approach UX and UI design and design thinking techniques, through live practice rather than just theory. I've also mentored University of Houston students through portfolio reviews and student project pitches.

Leading beyond the product isn't just the quality of the solution. It's how clearly you frame the problem, build alignment, sharpen decision-making, and leave the team with something they can reuse.

Get in touch

Let's simplify something complex.

Got an enterprise workflow or system that's gotten away from the team? I'd love to hear about it.

Say hello