Amanda SchmutzlerUX designer
who makes complicated
systems feel simple.
16+ years designing trusted experiences across e-commerce, financial services, healthcare, media, and ed-tech.
A little more about me
and how I work
I'm a User Experience Designer with 16+ years leading design for complex, high-stakes platforms — marketplace B2B SaaS, fintech, healthcare, and entertainment. I set product design strategy, build and govern design systems, and lead research-driven design across cross-functional teams.
My background is in human factors psychology (M.A., Cal State Northridge), so my work starts with rigorous user understanding and ends with measurable outcomes: better task completion, cleaner flows, and designs that hold up at enterprise scale. I mentor designers, partner closely with product and engineering leadership, and care deeply about accessibility — not as a checkbox, but as a design standard.
At Walmart Marketplace, I led the redesign of the Brand Portal, designing a Brand Portfolio experience supporting 5.7M branded products and projected to contribute up to $50M in incremental GMV. At McGraw Hill, I designed a CMS supporting 40,000+ ALEKS learning algorithms used by millions of students.
My work has also included healthcare experiences for 12.5M+ Kaiser Permanente members and UX strategy for Disney, plus dashboard and admin tooling at Racecar Build and Walmart's Brand Portal, and product work at Capital One and Extron Electronics.
I've spent much of my career designing high-stakes, complex systems, where usability, accessibility, and business requirements all have to work together. I've also led and mentored designers while staying hands-on with the craft. At the heart of my work is a simple goal: understand what people really need and make complicated things feel easy.
Real estate is part of my story too — I held a license and worked as a residential agent with Great Texas Properties, handling client consultations, contract negotiation, and closings; you can see my sales history and client reviews on my Zillow profile. I'm also a hands-on landlord, having owned and self-managed rental properties for the past decade, handling leasing, tenant relationships, and repairs myself. That operational, real-world experience shapes how I approach every complex system I design, no matter the industry.
Outside of work, you'll usually find me in the middle of a DIY home project. When I'm not doing that, I'm hanging out with my son Taylor, and our two bulldogs, Tyson and Zoe.
A closer look at four projects
Many of these were built for regulated, enterprise-scale products under NDA, so details here focus on problem, process, and impact.
Rebuilding Brand Portfolio, Walmart Marketplace's permissions system
Third-party sellers drove over 45% of Walmart's online sales in 2023 — but the Brand Portfolio tool inside Walmart Marketplace's Brand Portal, which controls who on a seller's team can edit content, manage listings, and use marketing tools, hadn't kept pace. I rebuilt that permissions system from the ground up.
$50M+ projected incremental GMV · 5.7M branded products impacted
View full case study
Express Counterfeit Removal, a guided batch-claim flow for Walmart Marketplace
Brand owners could already report a counterfeit listing, but only one at a time, through a form that could take days to resolve — too slow against catalogs with dozens of look-alike listings at once. I replaced that with a guided, self-serve wizard that lets qualified brand owners search the catalog and report counterfeit listings across multiple sellers in a single pass.
Resolution time cut from a multi-day process to one guided flow
View full case study
Get Care: unifying how 12.5M+ members find care at Kaiser Permanente
Members had four different, disconnected ways to access care — phone, online, urgent, and in-person — with no single place to see them all. I unified those paths into one clear "Get Care" experience, designed and validated inside a highly regulated clinical environment that had to meet ADA accessibility standards at every step.
12.5M+ members served · 4 access paths unified into 1
View full case study
Racecar Build
Racecar Build is a progression-management software platform for the residential new-construction marketplace, spanning a web app, iPad and iPhone field apps for crews, a customer-facing iPad app, and a stakeholder iPad app — unified by one style guide and shared flows built from user personas.
5 platforms unified into 1 shared system · 4 user roles served
View full case studyA closer look at the range beyond the flagship case studies — healthcare, ed-tech, entertainment, financial services, and consumer web.
True Haven Mental Health
A telehealth psychiatric practice website — service pages, pricing, and online booking, built end-to-end with Claude AI.
Appointment Scheduling
Lets members efficiently schedule doctor appointments across web and mobile, validated through usability testing.
Documentation Project
Documented every component in the Kaiser design system, from tabs to bill cards, for consistency across teams.
HEX Style Guide
The Walt Disney Studios' shared design system, promoting standard design behavior and UI consistency across teams.
Residuals
Rerun — a system that ensures The Walt Disney Studios principals are paid residuals for years to come.
PPL
Placement, Preparation & Learning for college math placement, with admin customization and configurable rules.
How I lead through complexity
Understand the system
Ground the work in the org, constraints, and business stakes around a problem — not just the user need in isolation.
Align stakeholders
Turn ambiguity into a clear, shared problem definition that cross-functional leadership can commit to.
Set direction
Generate and pressure-test a range of solutions, then commit to a design vision and system-level patterns that scale.
Prototype
Build testable, low- to high-fidelity versions at the right speed to keep decisions and stakeholders moving.
Validate & iterate
Close the loop with usability testing and live data, feeding results back into what ships next.
Skills & tools
Research & Strategy
- Experience Strategy & Product Vision
- Design Thinking & Strategic Facilitation
- Systems Thinking & Complex Problem Solving
- User Research & Usability Testing
- Journey Mapping & Service Design
- Product Strategy & Business Alignment
- Human Factors & Behavioral Psychology
Design & Prototyping
- Interaction & Experience Design
- Rapid Prototyping & Visualization
- Information Architecture & User Flows
- Design Systems & UX Standards
- Cross-Platform UX Design
- Accessibility & Inclusive Design
- Concept Validation & Iterative Design
Tools & AI
- Figma, FigJam, Figma AI & Figma Make
- Miro & Maze
- Adobe Creative Cloud
- Jira & Confluence
- ChatGPT, Claude & Google Stitch
- Agentic AI Workflows
- AI-Augmented Ideation & Rapid Prototyping
Strategic Leadership
- Cross-Functional Workshop Facilitation
- Executive & Stakeholder Alignment
- Consensus Building & Influence
- Leading Through Ambiguity
- Design Leadership & Mentorship
- Product, Engineering & Business Partnership
- Agile & Design Sprint Facilitation
Career timeline
Principal User Experience Designer — Walmart Marketplace
- Set the UX vision and design strategy for the Walmart Marketplace Brand Portal, leading a full redesign from its dated, legacy interface to a modern experience aligned with Walmart Marketplace's new style guide, and partnering with product and engineering leadership to align portal design with platform strategy.
- Designed a complex analytics dashboard spanning the entire Brand Portal, giving brand partners visibility into content management and performance across 5.7M branded products — on a platform responsible for 45% of Walmart's online sales and projected to contribute up to $50M in incremental GMV.
- Drove design-system adoption and accessibility standards across the portal, and simplified a complex, multi-step seller workflow into a clearer, more intuitive experience that reduced friction for brand partners navigating the platform day to day.
- Directed user research and usability testing with brand partners, drove UX strategy for affiliate marketing initiatives, and served as the primary design point of contact — presenting research findings and design rationale to align stakeholders and drive decisions across a large, complex organization.
Design Manager — Capital One
- Led and mentored designers on Capital One's auto loan business — elevating their strategic thinking and design craft through regular hands-on critique to advance the design practice.
- Set design direction and quality standards for design work on the auto loan business, running regular critique sessions and pairing on complex problems to raise the bar on craft and strategic thinking.
- Represented the design team in cross-functional planning with product and engineering leadership, prioritizing design work against business timelines and presenting design rationale directly to senior stakeholders.
- Established a continuous discovery and iteration practice — regularly evaluating live designs against user feedback and business metrics to prioritize what shipped next.
Principal User Experience Designer — Capital One
- Drove a user-centered redesign of the complex, multi-stakeholder auto loan application and decisioning process — a high-stakes, data-heavy financial workflow in a highly regulated environment — building journey maps and service blueprints from on-site research with finance managers, sales staff, and dealership teams to ground decisions in real-world workflows.
- Partnered across product, technology, and business teams to translate research into high-fidelity Figma prototypes and reusable design-system patterns, presenting design rationale and recommendations to senior leadership to align stakeholders and influence product strategy.
Licensed Real Estate Agent — Great Texas Properties
- Concurrent with UX work, managed residential real estate transactions end-to-end as a licensed Realtor — client consultations, contract negotiation, and closing — applying the same client-driven approach used in product design work.
- Coordinated with lenders, inspectors, and title companies to keep every transaction on schedule, and maintained an active real estate license in good standing, meeting state licensing, continuing education, and compliance requirements.
Senior User Experience Designer — Kaiser Permanente
- As part of the ACAA (Access Care Anytime, Anywhere) team, owned design of the Welcome Page and contributed to Get Care — unifying how members find and access care — designing and usability-testing fully responsive layouts for a health system serving 12+ million members.
- Held a high bar for accessibility on every deliverable, ensuring designs met ADA/WCAG standards so members could access care regardless of ability, while contributing to the team's design style guide and documentation to help standardize patterns across digital touchpoints.
- Worked on the appointment scheduling system, facilitating working sessions with clinical and business stakeholders and producing UI/UX comps and interactive prototypes grounded in user research and usability testing.
Senior User Experience Designer — The Walt Disney Studios
- Defined end-to-end UX strategy and developed interactive prototypes for the residual payments system and the Disney Music Group content management system — two high-complexity internal platforms, one where accuracy directly affected whether talent and rights holders were paid correctly, the other distributing music content to platforms including Pandora, Spotify, and Amazon Music.
- Reduced payment errors and delays, and facilitated stakeholder alignment through user research and usability testing with employee stakeholders before engineering investment.
- Contributed to HEX, Disney's internal design system documentation, helping standardize UI patterns across studio tooling and structuring ambiguous requirements into clear direction that helped content teams manage assets more efficiently.
User Experience Designer — McGraw Hill Education
- Structured requirements and led design for ALEKS's internal content management system, which authors and stores 40,000+ learning algorithms behind instruction used by millions of students, conducting on-site school visits to see how students and teachers used the product.
- Led usability testing and rapid prototyping across K-12, higher-ed, and consumer markets — including course placement (PPL), instructor dashboards, and student account experiences — folding findings directly back into design iterations and testing every design for ADA compliance.
Interaction Designer — Extron Electronics
- Designed the interface for Extron's Product Configuration Software (PCS) and the IN1600-series scaler product family, creating a consistent configuration experience across device discovery, network connectivity, and backup/restore workflows — including recovery from failure states — and earned a networking certification to support design work on network-connected AV hardware.
- Pioneered the use of prototyping tools at the company to build low- and mid-fidelity interactive prototypes.
User Experience Analyst — User Centric
- Facilitated client-facing focus groups and usability tests, identifying issues and gathering insights across a range of technological devices.
- Organized findings into clear, actionable documentation for stakeholders.
Freelance Web Designer — Self-Employed
- Designed the full construction project management platform for freelance client Racecar Build, including a dashboard for tracking and visualizing project data.
- Founded and ran a custom Harley-Davidson wheel company, designed and built its website end-to-end while operating the business, and designed freelance sites for a hair stylist, a psychologist, and a mental health nurse practitioner.
M.A. Psychology — Human Factors
California State University, Northridge
B.A. Psychology — Minor, Child Development
California State University, Chico
What colleagues and clients say
Walmart Marketplace
"I could trust Amanda to flex her depth of contribution and manage the timelines/speed needed to maintain the product roadmap for a new and fast moving team. She did a great job sharing UX design principles/perspectives while also being willing to work with product mgmt on combining perspectives. Amanda would make herself available when product would need it and be highly collaborative in these sessions. Amanda also had a good grip on the resources that were available to our greater team and how they could advance our initiatives."
Walmart Marketplace
"Amanda could handle large, complex initiatives and consistently deliver them within ambitious timelines. She was a true team player, keeping pace with a fast-moving roadmap while never losing sight of the bigger picture. She partnered well with product managers, had a strong grasp of customer problems, and communicated UX principles and design standards clearly and effectively. I could always trust her to deliver on complex initiatives under tight timelines — a real testament to her command of both product and UX thinking."
True Haven Mental Health
"I had the pleasure of working with Amanda on the design and development of my website, and I truly could not be happier with the result. She took the time to understand my vision, the feeling I wanted the website to convey, and the audience I was trying to reach, and then brought it all together in a way that exceeded my expectations. What impressed me most was her ability to balance creativity with functionality. She has an excellent eye for design and detail, but she also understands that a great website needs to be intuitive, professional, and easy to navigate. She was thoughtful throughout the entire process, receptive to feedback, and incredibly patient as we refined the details. The finished website feels polished, cohesive, and genuinely representative of my brand. I have received so many compliments on it, and I am incredibly proud to have it represent my business. I would highly recommend Amanda to anyone looking for someone who is talented, creative, reliable, and truly invested in delivering a website her clients will love. She did an exceptional job, and I would work with her again without hesitation."
Capital One
"Amanda was an outstanding influence on me as a designer. She was ever present — I never felt alone during the months we worked virtually — and provided excellent feedback that molded my growth as a designer."
Kaiser Permanente
"I know I can reliably count on her for solving complex UX problems, designing and documenting design system components, and prototyping large-scale flows at blistering speeds."
Walt Disney Studios
"Amanda is a no-drama senior level experience designer that I have relied upon to consistently perform, meet and exceed expectations. She is diligent, organized and practical. Amanda is unassumingly awesome."
Walt Disney Studios
"I worked with Amanda to bring a complicated financial enterprise application to life. She is a quick learner who makes sure all the right questions are asked, then executed on the solutions — able to convey product needs through her design and deliver high-quality applications for our users."
Racecar Build
"Amanda has a mind that can take a number of moving parts and understand how to organize the digital experience into something practical. Full recommendations to anyone considering working with Amanda."
McGraw Hill Education
"Amanda handled complex projects with ease and speed, creating high-fidelity prototypes to illustrate concepts to stakeholders and for usability testing. It was a pleasure working with her — she is a great asset to any UX design team."
The Looking Glass
"Amanda put together not only a plan but also a prototype to execute it. Working both individually and collaboratively, the result was on time and on budget. She's good at running with concepts and putting in the time to get it right."
McGraw Hill Education
"An efficient worker with excellent problem-solving abilities, adept at the agile process and quick iterations. Amanda steps in to assist with user research too — a flexible worker and an asset to the team."
Data Science
"Talented designer and team player — a big help on a giant project I couldn't handle on my own. Works fast, solves complex problems, and is a quick learner with a high level of prototyping skill in Axure."
McGraw Hill Education
"Awesome to work with — a talented designer and team player who was a big help on a giant project. Works fast, solves complex problems quickly, and is a genuine pleasure to collaborate with."
Extron Electronics
"Amanda researched complex business and user problems to create intelligent design solutions. I got to witness her growth as both a researcher and designer — she has a passion and genuine empathy for users."
Psychologist
"Amanda is outstanding. She created my website, which resulted in increased referrals for my business. She's easy to work with, patient, responsive, quick, and a great listener. I highly recommend her."
CSU Northridge
"Amanda demonstrated the ability to complete all assignments on time and with high quality, with very good verbal and written communication skills. I'd highly recommend her for validating sophisticated user-machine systems."