Hello! You can call me Vern.

I started my career as a copywriter working at a performance marketing agency called QuinStreet. I wrote a lot of email and ad campaigns for brand partners like The Home Depot, Chase, and HP, but QuinStreet's internal lead-gen sites are where I started to learn about UX. Optimizing the content across sign up flows and landing pages was where I started crafting messaging with a greater focus on the user's perspective.

After a few years, I moved to Opower, an energy efficiency company that was acquired by Oracle Utilities about a year before I joined. Opower was created based on Dr. Robert Cialdini's psychological research into energy conservation, which found that peer pressure actually worked best in getting people to save energy.

To do this at scale, Opower's flagship Home Energy Report was designed to adapt to any utility's branding and deliver energy use comparisons directly to customers.

At Opower, I developed skills and experience in three specific areas:

1. Translating complex, intimidating concepts into plain language.
2. The psychology of driving behavior change.
3. Navigating heavily regulated industries with strict compliance requirements.

According to research by Accenture, people spend roughly 10 minutes per year thinking about their utility. The need for clear, concise language was absolutely critical to creating successful energy efficiency products at Opower. While there, my biggest projects were leading the content in a redesign of the Home Energy Report and developing a new email program focused on peak hour energy use and time-of-use rate plans.

After Opower, I joined Atlassian and worked across several teams in my tenure there. Across each team, I developed and applied the exact framework my services are based on. In my longest tenure, I led content for 4 platform apps as the sole content designer on the team, building the systems and governance standards to keep each of them aligned and consistent enough despite different audiences, use cases, and growth needs.

Now, I'm looking to work with product teams that need help managing their content. I know what that inconsistency costs, and I know how to fix it.

You can typically find me playing butler to two small children, aged 5.5 and 2.5. They take up the majority of my free time, whether they're riding bikes and scooters at the park, bossing me around in play time, or demanding snacks and cups of milk.

I enjoy cooking as a hobby, but it's hard to qualify something you do for survival as a hobby. Most weeknights, it's the usual rotations of easy-to-make meals that balance foods I know the kids will eat with slightly more adventurous things (like adding spinach to spaghetti).

But when I find a new recipe I want to try or have an event or potluck to cook for, I enjoy the craft of cooking and creating something for people to enjoy. Lately, I've been cooking with my kids a lot more which has doubled my normal cleanup and tripled my bonding time being able to teach what I know about food. This has not made them more likely to eat the food we actually cook, but we still enjoy doing it.

I've also played video games my entire life, another passion I'm sharing with my girls. My eldest daughter and I have played through all of Princess Peach: Showtime! together, and she's recently enjoyed talking to Pokémon friends in Pokémon Pokopia. By most standards, I'm considered an oldhead in gaming circles, having been around long enough to know firsthand why Discord calls their communities "Servers."

We've also taken to playing board games and card games with our girls, which brings out a healthy competitiveness in all of us. Our feral second child, however, is still learning how to wait patiently for her turn and how to not immediately bend cards the second we hand them to her. Our current favorites are Sleeping Queens, Hoot, Owl, Hoot!, and Sushi Go!

And if I'm not doing any of these things, I've somehow found time to sneak away to my local climbing gym to do some bouldering. I'm generally not the most athletic, but bouldering satisfies both the need for tangible accomplishment and the innate urge to climb the really tall thing.