Hi, I’m Ted Billups

I believe technology and design can solve complex problems to provide everyone access to affordable, reliable clean energy. For my part, I bring people in design, research, engineering, innovation, and business together to identify opportunities, set vision, lead teams, create and launch digital solutions.
‍
As a principal design consultant for a leading energy utility and alongside the world’s largest tech companies, I focus on rapid innovation, behavior change, and energy data at the grid edge.

VISION

What does the future look like? Let’s find out together.

For 2025 I'm working as an intrapreneur, evaluating opportunities and creating solutions at the grid edge to benefit customers and the business. I focus on understanding energy ecosystems and product portfolios to isolate strategic focus areas. I set a vision, lead cross-functional teams, participate in product research, lean design, technology build, and show business impact.

I am rooted in user experience design, human behavior, and proving out desirability, viability, and feasibility.

I leverage a will be centered around:

Research: Perform and work closely with research to deliver qual and quant insights
Desirability: Rapid prototyping to quickly understand desirability and whether solutions will solve customer’s problems
Viability: measuring impact to the business over time
Feasibility: exploring and isolating ideal solutions
Teams: continuing to find and foster the growth of talented, compassionate, intelligent people in a positive culture of clarity, learning, empowerment and flow
evangelizing an intellectual basis for design discussions, practices, a shared language of design thinking, and innovation with executive, product, engineering, research and other groups
creating feedback-rich, emotionally engaging software experiences that provide self-endorsed, intrinsic value to users

VISION

My career vision is to evolve as a UX leader and designer; helping cross-functional teams create authentic, engaging experiences that deliver clear value, resulting in stronger trust between brand and users.

Focusing on:

crafting a north star, vision and roadmaps that align up and across the organization, and within the UX teams, for a SaaS, ecommerce or related company
translating insights into design opportunities to create concise strategies and design executions against business objectives and users' needs
continuing to find and foster the growth of talented, compassionate, intelligent people in a positive culture of clarity, learning, empowerment and flow
evangelizing an intellectual basis for design discussions, practices, a shared language of design thinking, and innovation with executive, product, engineering, research and other groups
evolving UX practices in an Agile cross-functional organization
measuring our work so we can feel accomplishment and grow
creating feedback-rich, emotionally engaging software experiences that provide self-endorsed, intrinsic value to users

TRUST

I’ve supported enterprise brands, organizations, and built agencies for over 20 years; as an executive, team leader and principal.

career

Getting Here

Digital was new. I began my career helping create CNN.com. I ventured out forming a digital agency in Chicago, grew it profitably to 130 by working with brilliant pioneers in user experience (Nielsen/Norman) and building software for innovative brands. Foundational lessons in managing people, the complexities of design and technology projects, how to run a rapidly growing business, and the cultural challenges of merging into a larger concern.

Next chapter. Founded a new digital agency focused on global travel & leisure, retail, and startups. Along the way I invented and sold software to Adobe (what a ride that was), which led to being sought after for pushing the boundaries of UX atop the Adobe Experience stack for global personalization in web, app, and marketing. The team grew its design, software and marketing chops and eventually merged with an enterprise software company to build experiences at vast scale.

Intrinsic over extrinsic. Seeking evolution I found Carnevale, a future experiences agency of incredible talent, compassion, and wild imagination. I dove deep into behavior change design and realized I need to solve people's most persistent, pervasive challenges through clean energy in a cross-functional corporate environment. I am Principal Experience Design for Pilots and Strategic Partnerships at Consumers Energy where I have the autonomy work with any group and strategically lean in; robust research and UX design, complex IT, business and customer impact evaluation, infrastructure, legal, whatever it takes to deliver energy efficiency, resiliency, and load growth that impacts millions of people every day.

experience

Portfolio Highlights

Much of my recent work is confidential.

Adobe BrowserLab

A need turns into an invention and SaaS product to help millions.

Spectrum Health Executive Vision

Aligning executive business needs around the patient journey.

SRT Viper Configurator

25 million ways to outfit your supercar in a dynamic web-based 3D customizer.

Hyatt UX Booking Path

Creating an agile UX department to continuously improve the booking path.

Design Systems and UX Process

Years of expertise creating and managing design systems at scale.

design systems, components, patterns and proceess

Ingersoll Rand Global Portfolio

Personalized BotB product commerce around the world.

Association of International CPAs

Enterprise personalization for 10 key persona archetypes across 50 sites.

Global Business Analytics Strategy

Global analytics reporting audit and strategy for data re-platforming.

Analytics Reporting Gathering and Recommendations

more ux work

ux principles

Building trust between people and brands through experiences is challenging. I work with teams to solve this.

I work closely within organizations to establish a clear vision, create and lead teams, and ultimately deliver software that is valuable to users. This statement sounds simple enough, but it requires creating experiences that engage users in authentic ways, helping them see progress towards their self-endorsed goals to better envision who they can be.

In addition to 20 years of running software companies and directing design teams, I’ve refined user-centered design practices to go beyond utility, task-focused software by focusing on human behavior and business results.

Designing for Trust in Software

I strengthen the relationship between people and brands through better software engagement

Can we offer users more than usability and task efficiency?

UX principles

Is task-focused UX Design the best way?

The bulk of BtoB and BtoC software are task-focused utility experiences. The software meets business and users’ needs via established mental models, ux design patterns and performance metrics. This is good.

‍There is an opportunity to engage users more deeply.

I believe the future of UX design includes leveraging behavioral and game design to create feedback-rich, emotionally engaging experiences that flourish where users are most receptive.

The Evolution of UX Design is Authentic Engagement

What is Authentic Engagement?

reflecting progress towards self-endorsed goals
feedback-rich where people are receptive
focused on users’ values and goals
relevant and clearly valuable
humane; intrinsic over extrinsic values

I believe authentic engagement is achieved through a deeper understanding of people’s behaviors, motivations and abilities.
‍
Engagement is most effective when users have autonomy, competence and relatedness.
‍
Better engagement leads to better outcomes and trust.

Authentic Engagement is self-endorsed, feedback-rich, relevant, intrinsic and valuable.

ux principles

Designing for Consensus

Great design can bring clarity and consensus within an organization. I encourage a transparent process that iteratively produces increasingly detailed, visual assets to bring stakeholders together to solve a common challenge.

Value is especially created and demonstrable when a product is well designed, people are properly trained, and the UX process is easy to understand and utilize. Ultimately, diverse organizational groups like product, technology, design, marketing, support and executives can more easily speak the same language, stay informed, and get behind one vision.

Concise design artifacts can be shared up, down, across, and between organizations to build consensus

When you don't design for Consensus, change gets expensive

The 1 : 10 : 100 Rule

For every $1 to fix a problem during Research and Design, it would cost $10 to fix the same problem in Development, and would cost $100 to fix the same problem after the product’s release. Source: Forrester

1:10:100 Rule. 1 dollar in research and design would cost 10 dollars in development and cost 100 dollars in a released product.

Ideas, opinions and articles

Onward and Upward

Create Authentic Engagement - How to go beyond task-focused software to create emotionally rich, authentic engagement in user experiences.

4/29/2022

What if we go beyond user tasks and usability? Can we craft user attention and create positive, authentic engagement at will? Because this relies on behavior design, can we do this in humane ways? My colleagues and I tested this hypothesis in a skunkworks project and case study, and the answer is an exciting yes, but I need your help to explore and prove this out further.

working together

Consulting and Advising

Ted Billups advising on user experience design

It’s safe to say I’m accustomed to working and supporting cross-functional teams creating software across all stages of product development, business strategy, and design. If you’re working on a problem related to improving user experiences for complex business and consumer software through deeper engagement there’s a good chance I could be of help.

I limit my consulting, advisory and tactical work to a select group of companies and individuals each year. If you'd like to discuss possibilities, please reach out.

Let’s make experiences better, together.

articles

UX Principles

Create Authentic Engagement - How to go beyond task-focused software to create emotionally rich, authentic engagement in user experiences.

Apr 29, 2022

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse varius enim in eros elementum tristique. Duis cursus, mi quis viverra ornare, eros dolor interdum nulla, ut commodo diam libero vitae erat. Aenean faucibus nibh et justo cursus id rutrum lorem imperdiet. Nunc ut sem vitae risus tristique posuere.