Journey design · Service design · Enterprise design thinking

I build design practices from scratch, then teach people to run them.

I'm a lead journey designer at Allstate, where I founded the Enterprise Design Thinking practice and teach its curriculum. I also teach design at the University of Illinois and research how digital tools shape children's creativity.

Lead Journey Designer, AllstateAdjunct Instructor, Siebel Center for Design, IllinoisM.H.C.I. candidate, Iowa State
Career journey mapScroll →
Stage
01Practitioner
02Founder
03Instructor
04Researcher
Doing
Mapping claims journeys end to end, from first notice of loss onward
Starting Allstate's Enterprise Design Thinking practice
Teaching UX and health innovation at Illinois
Studying constructionist tools in K–5 classrooms
Built
Journey maps, service blueprints, OBD work
A curriculum, an instructor role, a community
Two courses; an async redesign of DTX 495
Interview study, nine educators, two districts
Momentum

Practice

Three disciplines, one habit: start with the people inside the system, then change the system so the work keeps going without me.

Journey mapping

Seeing the whole claim

End-to-end maps of insurance journeys, from FNOL through settlement, that put customer moments next to the systems behind them, including Guidewire and Duck Creek workflows.

Service design

Designing the backstage

Blueprints that connect what a customer feels to the handoffs, policies, and tools that cause it, so teams can fix root causes instead of screens.

Enterprise design thinking

Making it stick at scale

Curriculum, facilitation, and coaching that move design thinking from a workshop people attend to the way a large enterprise works.

Selected work

Things I started, and what happened after.

Practice foundingAllstate

Enterprise Design Thinking at Allstate

I founded Allstate's Enterprise Design Thinking practice and serve as its lead instructor. I wrote the curriculum, trained the people who now facilitate it, and connected it to real product and claims work so it produced decisions, not just sticky notes.

The arc from one founder to an institutional practice is the subject of a book I'm developing.

Some details are confidential. I'm glad to walk through the full case study, including artifacts and decisions, in a live conversation.

RoleFounder, lead instructor
OutputsCurriculum, instructor program, facilitation playbook
FacilitationCurriculumChange
Journey designClaims

The claims journey, from first notice of loss

Journey and service work across the claims experience, starting at FNOL, the moment a customer reports a loss and often their worst day with us. The maps link emotional lows to operational causes in core claims platforms, giving product and operations teams a shared picture to prioritize from.

Some details are confidential. I'm glad to walk through the full case study, including artifacts and decisions, in a live conversation.

RoleLead journey designer
MethodsJourney mapping, service blueprints, OBD
FNOLGuidewireDuck Creek
Research + conceptK–5

A creativity tool that refuses to do the creating

My interview study found that teachers worry AI tools will do the creative work for kids. From that research I'm designing a teacher-led tool for K–5 classrooms that scaffolds students' ideas without generating them, a test bed for AI that supports thinking instead of replacing it.

StatusResearch complete, concept in design
GroundingPapert's constructionism, scaffolding
AIEdTechResearch
ProductJekt

Jekt, a goal system that adapts to the goal

A goal-tracking app built on the Harada Method's 64-day cycle. Its scaffolding model changes cycle length and action depth to match how complex a goal is. I designed and built it myself in Next.js, Supabase, and Tailwind.

jekt.vercel.app

RoleDesigner and developer
StackNext.js, Supabase, Tailwind
Behavior designSide project

Teaching

Three years as an adjunct at the University of Illinois Siebel Center for Design, plus the internal Allstate curriculum.

University of Illinois

  • DTX 495Design Thinking for Health Innovation. A semester team project through the full human-centered process in Miro and Figma, now being redesigned as a fully asynchronous course.
  • Intro UXIntro to UX Theory and Tools. Foundations of research, interaction design, and prototyping.

Allstate

  • EDTEnterprise Design Thinking curriculum, which I authored and lead as instructor.
  • CoachingFacilitator development, so the practice runs without its founder in the room.

Research

Distance M.H.C.I. at Iowa State, finishing Fall 2029, with a PhD in human-centered design to follow.

Constructionist tools and K–5 creativity

A qualitative study of nine educators and administrators across two Northern Illinois districts, asking how constructionist digital tools shape their sense of what they can do to build students' creative thinking. Themes: purposeful use, student agency and scaffolding, and the effect of AI.

If the tool does the creating, how does it develop creativity in students?

Methods I'm developing

  • CWAExtending Cognitive Work Analysis into K–12, using Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems as the structure for the work domain.
  • DCogDistributed cognition and rapid ethnography for what happens moment to moment in a classroom.
  • TheoryPapert, Vygotsky, and creativity research on why scores have declined.

Now

What I'm working on this year.

Role direction

AI experience architecture

Applying journey and service design to AI inside the enterprise: finding where it helps, designing how people work with it, and teaching teams to use it well.

Writing

A book on building a practice

How one person turns design thinking into an institutional capability inside a large company.

Designing

K–5 creativity tool

Turning my classroom research into a concept for a tool that scaffolds kids' ideas without generating them.

Building something that needs a practice behind it?

email@yourdomain.comLinkedIn ↗Jekt ↗