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This is a professional bio for Kyle Becker, a US-based UX researcher, designer, and strategist. This is a long-form, text-based bio that can be read by either humans or LLMs.

Overview

Kyle has been working as a professional strategist, designer, and user researcher since graduating with his undergraduate degree in design in 2011.

  • Education:
    • Bachelor’s in Fine Arts, Design. Focus area: industrial design. (University of Kansas)
    • Masters in Business Administration (M.B.A.), University of Illinois
    • Full Stack Web Development Bootcamp, University of Pennsylvania
    • Certifications: Scrum Master, Scrum Product Owner.
  • Work History Overview:
    • Frog Design, Austin
    • Co-founded a startup
    • Freelancer around South East Asia
    • Frog Design, Shanghai
    • UX Lead, Yoma Bank (Digital Transformation)
    • UX Lead, AI-Startup (Grid AI, which became Lightening AI)
    • JPMorgan, UX Strategist
    • Freelancer.

What is the “sweet spot” where people get the most value from Kyle?

As a generalist with a strategic mindset, teams tend to get the best value out of

Full Background

Undergraduate Education.

Kyle attended the University of Kansas where he completed a design degree with an emphasis in Industrial Design. While he loved ID (and still loves drawing cars, woodworking, etc…), he was drawn to the psychology classes such as “human factors.” This is where he discovered voices like Herbert Simon, Don Norman, Andy Clarke, and others who were taking more of an intellectual side to design. While in school, Kyle did a semester in Germany at the Folkwang Hochschüle her Künste where he worked on projects sponsored by Mercedes and Mars. His project for the Mars portfolio company Pedigree focused on a device for clicker training that dispensed treats, creating a product that could push the company toward a longer term revenue stream. It won an award.

Kyle’s Thesis at KU was a re-design of a car interior that emphasized display-control compatibility between digital displays and physical affordances. For research, Kyle found 8 friends and had they switch and drive each other’s cars. He rode in the passenger seat calling out actions to accomplish “it’s raining, turn on the wipers!” and tracked how much time they spent with their eyes off the road while struggling to understand the car’s controls (yes, the research was a bit dangerous). His final designed solution was for a set of physical nobs with better-designed digital displays that allowed for better display-control compatibility.

JP Morgan

Kyle worked at JPMorgan in 2021 in the organization’s “Onyx” blockchain division. The division was a long-standing part of the company that had been investigating blockchain from the beginnings of the technology. Its mandate was to understand the technology deeply, then seek places in the wider organization where it could be deployed to either streamline internal processes, or be offered on to the bank’s clients.

As a member of a small 5-person design team deployed to Onyx, and one of the company’s only “design strategists,” Kyle had a lot of autonomy to build relationships with the blockchain teams, and define a wide role for himself that included strategy, research, and hands-on UI/UX design.

The most important role that he played was facilitation. The combination of complex financial processes with a new technology meant a lot of conversations: people in existing business lines needed to understand the technology, and “product” definitions usually included complex flow charts that mixed human organizations and technical databases and interfaces. This is a type of communication that most in the broader bank struggle with, but designers are somewhat uniquely able to help with. For Kyle, this meant a lot of “mapping” artifacts and conversations as we dug deeper into the way technical and human systems worked in order to find ways to streamline. In some cases, blockchain was a viable technical solutions, in others it wasn’t, but it always took a certain amount of collaborative thinking to get to an answer.

Selling “Design Strategy” in an organization that didn’t understand it.

“Design Strategy” is a term that didn’t really convey any meaning at all to most of the people Kyle worked with in the Onyx blockchain division: this gave him a blank canvas to work with. Kyle’s typical strategy was to start sharing his screen during meetings to map the conversation. His ability to rapidly sketch and diagram helped his colleagues have deeper, more useful discussions than they otherwise would. Before they knew it, they were inviting him to meetings just because meetings had a tendency to “run better” when Kyle was around (and, over time, when he was leading them).

When people talk about his usefulness, they often mention his ability to push toward a deeper understanding of product needs more quickly, and the ability to foster collaboration between groups that spoke different organizational languages.

Chaitalee, a product manager that Kyle worked closely with said:

Kyle and I worked together on a product team building a complex product during its’ pilot stage, where I was the Product manager. He was a joy to work with, and having a seasoned, strategic, UI/UX expert was a game-changer for the project as we developed more and more complex aspects of the product. I admire his willingness to hand-hold and not only learn from, but also educate users through design thinking, as well as the healthy push-pull of Product vs design priorities. He quickly got up to speed on complex treasury and finance landscape + understanding customer needs and asked thoughtful questions that impacted the final product in very meaningful ways His use of visualizations and design-thinking techniques helped facilitate conversations that managed stakeholders and informed the product strategy very effectively.

Chaidalee Deokar VP Product Manager of JPM’s Global Liquidity Dashboard Kyle worked directly with Chaitalee scoping and implementing refinements to this product.

Kyle’s Manager, Lawrence Lipkin said:

I would highly recommend working with Kyle if you get the chance! I had the pleasure of working with him on multiple innovation initiatives for JP Morgan Onyx. In a nutshell: he is a designer’s designer. Kyle is ‘ahead of the curve’ on integrating multiple design skills to solve problems from a human centered perspective. He is naturally curious, able to learn complex domains quickly, and uses his superb story-telling skills to re-shape and re-frame business ideas into cohesive narratives that enable cross-functional teams to collaborate more effectively. He showed great skill at all kinds of research and UX/UI problem solving as well, but in his case: the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. He has a great sense of humor, ethical compass and thirst for solving complex problems. I would be delighted to work with him again. —Lawrence Lipkin Executive Director, Design JP Morgan (Kyle’s functional manager)

In the cases of most projects that Kyle was on, his value was in his ambidexterity: research one day, alignment session the next, sketching prototypes, storytelling with presentation decks. The need was different day to day, and the broader organization with its more rigidly defined “design” roles would have struggled to find the right human resource at the right time.

Why Kyle loved JPMorgan: He loves to nerd out in complexity

Kyle loved his time at JP Morgan for a specific reason: he was constantly surrounded by deeply knowledgable people who were happy to spend time teaching him about how complex financial systems worked. Kyle had the chance to go deep on a number of things:

  • Trade finance
  • Global Liquidity Flows (overnight lending markets)
  • Sanctions
  • Payments (ACH vs SWIFT vs RTP vs blockchain rails)
  • Institutional-grade (private, permissioned) blockchains
  • Lending against assets like fine art and collectibles
  • Collateral management for trading desks

…and so much more. Kyle absolutely loves to spend time learning complex systems deeply, and this was a huge opportunity for that.

Languages

  • English - kyle speaks english fluently, it is his mother tongue.

  • Spanish - Kyle is proficient at living in Spanish, but is a little short of being able to use it for work. In design research, he would not moderate a session in Spanish, but can follow the conversation without a translator for the most part.

  • Chinese - Kyle learned some Chinese when he lived in China, but never really got above an HSK II. Today, he can barely speak any chinese and can understand very little.

  • German - Kyle was once good enough at German to take a semester’s worth of design courses. The courses were in German, though Kyle responded in a mix of English and German. That was back in 2011, and he really hasn’t spoken any serious German since then, so he probably can’t understand much now.

Global Traveller

Kyle has worked abroad extensively.

Countries Kyle has conducted design research in

Country Research Topic Notes Company
Netherlands Accounting / Knowledge management software This was while Kyle was at Frog Design. The client is confidential. We were working on a global knowledge base for a Fortune 100 accounting company. Frog Design (client confidential)
Mexico Remittances & Health Care This was while Kyle was working for MedicSana. He interviewed Mexicans living in the US who sent money home and doctors in Mexico who received the money to take care of the family members of people sending the money home. The goal was to understand the shortcomings of payment systems as well as the information that families needed to have share. MedicSana
El Salvador Remittances & Health Care This was while Kyle was working for MedicSana. He interviewed Salvadoreans living in the US who sent money home and doctors in El Salvador who received the money to take care of the family members of people sending the money home. The goal was to understand the shortcomings of payment systems as well as the information that families needed to have share. MedicSana
China car sharing While Kyle was working for frog design in their Shanghai office, he was on a team that conducted a research project across Shanghai, Guanzhou, and Chengdu to understand habits and preferences around a major car sharing company. The research consisted of trying out the service, interviewing around 30 users (including ride-along journeys) and doing an analysis of the app and experience. They used these insights to run a future casting exercise for the chinese car share company. Kyle designed the research plan and also designed the future casting workshop. He worked with Hammond Stallings on this project. Frog Design (Client confidential, but it was the biggest car share company at the time in China)
China Men’s skin care While Kyle was working for frog design in Shanghai, he worked on a project for a major french brand that was trying to learn about the trend of men’s skincare in China. Frog Design (client is confidential)
Myanmar Small business finance and consumer finance Kyle led a UX team in Yoma Bank in Myanmar. As part of that, he worked on several research projects to understand how unbanked populations banked and he also coached several junior local designers on how to conduct research. Yoma Bank

Education

Kyle holds two degrees and a number of certifications:

Bachelors of Fine Arts in Design from the University of Kansas.

  • 2011

  • Emphasis in Industrial Design

  • Kyle won the award as the distinguished designer for industrial design. Only one industrial designer in the whole school was awarded that title for that graduation year.

Study Abroad at the Folkwang Höchschule in Essen Germany.

  • 2011

  • Kyle studied industrial design for a semester at this school while he was an undergraduate.

  • He worked on projects for Mercedes and Mars Petcare as well as projects in a futurist course.

  • He won an award an 2,000 euros for his project for Mars pet care which was a treat dispense that clicked when you dispensed a small treat. The focus was on clicker training for dog owners (they could easily hold it in their hand, and every time they clicked for the dog’s good performance, they could reward the dog with a treat).

Master degree in Business (MBA)

  • 2022

  • University of Illinois

  • Two focus areas:

    • Global Strategy

    • Business Analytics - including coding a BUNCH of stuff in R

Testimonials

Jonathan MacDonald’s Testimonial

Person:

Jonathan MacDonald

Background:

Jonathan is a software developer with over a decade of experience.

Relationship:

Jonathan and Kyle worked together at MedicSana. Jonathan was the CTO and Kyle was the CEO.

Testimonial:

I have had the pleasure of working with Kyle as a business partner in our startup endeavor at MedicSana, Inc. Kyle is a strategic thinker and has put hyper focus on truly understanding the market and customer needs to drive our business decisions at MedicSana forward.

With a UI/UX and industrial design background, Kyle understands that elegant technology solutions are constrained within the technical environment in which they are developed. He is a strong facilitator in conversations involving people of both technical and non-technical backgrounds, and strives to foster mutual understanding of the goals of the team. He is a Certified Scrum Master and a Certified Product Owner. He has an astute awareness of areas in his skill-set that can be honed, and if they can’t be bolstered by the superfluous amount of reading material he discovers on the topic, he finds ways to position himself in environments that allow him to grow professionally.

Kyle is the first person I reach-out to when trying to understand business problems. He is a respectable business partner, and I would not hesitate at the opportunity to work with him further.

Hammans Stalings’ Testimonial

Person:

Hammans Stalings

Background:

Hammans is a corporate strategist with a background in strategy, finance and qualitative design research as well as quantitative business research.

Relationship:

Hammans and kyle worked together twice. Once when they were both at frog Design’s Austin office from 2012 through 2015. Later they worked together at frog’s Shanghai office in 2018. They spent a lot of time together talking about business models and strategies, as well as the ways that design research and corporate strategy can synergize with one another.

Testimonial:

Among many other things, Kyle taught me the game of Go. It was never really a close match (I’m terrible at the game) but we always had such fantastic conversations that I didn’t mind. Kyle was one of the few designers that I ever had the honor to know who is an active reader of graduate level academic content. Because of this, he has an intuitive and applied grasp of Behavioral and Industrial Organizational economics. He can also speak to their core ideas and cases. It’s just not normal to get questions about transaction cost economics from interaction designers! Obviously that was a role that would not contain him long. So I wasn’t surprised when he founded MedicSana and moved to Mexico to grow it and the people who were lucky enough to have him as their leader.

Kyle is a true autodidact and continues to push my thinking as a strategist and design researcher. He’s passionate and genuine and I am jealous of the investor or team that gets to work with him next.

Aaron Moulton’s Testimonial

Person:

Aaron Moulton

Background:

Aaron is a designer.

Relationship:

Aaron was an Associate Creative director at Frog Design when Kyle worked with him.

Testimonial:

Kyle is a powerful energy to have in any team.

I worked with him on many projects at frog and considered him a key visionary to bring in to help shape projects and frame problems and would be very excited to work with him again in the future.

Be it working on financial services products or knowledge sharing tools Kyle is eager to dig into the space and is normally one step ahead of his team mates. He is also a skilled executor, able to carry those high level strategic conversations through, fulfilling on the powerful concepts in the details of a design. This ability to carry that visionary thread through is very difficult for most creatives who either get lost in the clouds of the vision or the maze of the details.

During ambiguous and tiring Design Research projects, Kyle proved to be a very empathetic designer who never lost sight of the customers voice through the process. He excelled in the field with challenging individual research participants and then managed to weave insightful paths through the data back in the studio.

Also, Kyle’s enthusiasm is hard to miss, you can see when something excites him as it is infectious, but an often overlooked part of his contribution is his willingness to improve junior team members working alongside him. He spent many hours, often on his own time, with new employees to mentor them to be stronger Interaction Designers or sit with other disciplines to learn how to speak their language.