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 Principal UX Designer with 16+ years of experience. I've worked across e-commerce, financial services, healthcare, media, and ed-tech. My focus is turning complex problems into simple, human-centered experiences. I lead the full process — research, strategy, prototyping, and high-fidelity design — in close partnership with product and engineering.
At Walmart Marketplace, I led the redesign of the Brand Portal. I designed a Brand Portfolio experience supporting 5.7M branded products. It's 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 12M+ Kaiser Permanente members and UX strategy for Disney. I've designed dashboard and admin tooling at Racecar Build and Walmart's Brand Portal. I've also done product work at Capital One and Extron Electronics.
I've spent much of my career designing high-stakes, complex systems. Usability, accessibility, and business requirements all have to work together. I've also led and mentored designers while staying hands-on with the craft.
Outside of design, I used to hold a real estate license and worked as a residential agent with Great Texas Properties. I'm also a hands-on landlord. I've owned and self-managed rental properties since my mid-twenties — handling leasing, tenant relationships, and repairs myself. That operational, real-world experience gives me a grounded, practical lens. I bring it to any complex system I design, not just one industry.
At the heart of my work is a simple goal: understand what people really need and make complicated things feel easy.
Outside of work, you'll usually find me in the middle of a DIY home project or hanging out with my one-year-old 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. This project rebuilt that permissions system from the ground up.
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. This project 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.
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. This project 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.
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.
View full case study18 additional projects across healthcare, ed-tech, automotive, 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.
My Looking Glass
Beauty tips, tutorials, and a mirror / camera / photo editor with shareable community groups.
Appointment Scheduling
Lets members efficiently schedule doctor appointments across web and mobile.
Documentation Project
Documented every component in the Kaiser design system, from tabs to bill cards.
DNote
Content management system for all The Walt Disney Studios music — new Work Lists, lock/unlock icons, and language enhancements.
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.
Car Dashboard Design Exercise
A touchscreen in-vehicle cockpit concept, replacing traditional controls.
PPL
Placement, Preparation & Learning for college math placement, with admin customization.
Student Module Mobile
Mobile heuristic evaluation and redesign of the adaptive student learning experience.
Engrade Integration
Merged two McGraw Hill entities — adaptive learning and LMS/assessment tools — into one experience.
Student Account Home
Groups all of a student's ALEKS classes under one umbrella account, tested via self-navigating usability study.
Pie Report
Visualizes learning rates and topic mastery per student, helping instructors track progress toward course completion.
A structured approach to every problem
Empathize
Deeply understand user needs, motivations, and constraints before proposing anything.
Define
Synthesize research into a clear, shared problem statement stakeholders can align around.
Ideate
Generate and stress-test a range of solutions rather than settling on the first idea.
Prototype
Build testable, low- to high-fidelity versions that make the idea real enough to react to.
Test
Gather real feedback and refine — usability testing is a loop, not a single checkpoint.
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
- Axure RP
- Jira & Confluence
- ChatGPT, Claude & Google Stitch
- 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
- Led a full redesign of the Walmart Marketplace Brand Portal and design for all of its new features, taking it from its legacy look and feel to align with Walmart Marketplace's new style guide, while defining end-to-end experience strategy and facilitating working sessions with cross-functional stakeholders to translate ambiguous business requirements into clear, testable product directions.
- Designed a Brand Portfolio experience to enable improved content management across 5.7M branded products and contribute up to $50M in incremental GMV, on a marketplace platform responsible for 45% of Walmart's online sales.
- Simplified a complex, multi-step seller workflow into a clearer, more intuitive experience, reducing friction for brand partners navigating the platform day to day.
- Drove UX strategy for affiliate marketing initiatives and the Marketplace account creation flow, applying the same stakeholder-alignment and research-driven approach across both efforts.
- Partnered with the research team on user research and usability testing, led rapid prototyping from wireframes through high-fidelity design, and served as the primary design point of contact, presenting research findings and recommendations to align stakeholders and drive decisions across a large, complex organization.
Design Manager | Senior User Experience Designer — Capital One
- Applied user-centered design principles to structure and streamline the ambiguous, multi-stakeholder auto loan process, conducting on-site research at car dealerships with finance managers, sales staff, and other dealership roles to ground decisions in real-world workflows.
- As a people manager, led and mentored a team of designers, elevating their strategic thinking and facilitation skills while coordinating project timelines and resourcing and continuously evaluating designs for impactful improvement.
Licensed Real Estate Agent — Great Texas Properties
- Managed residential real estate transactions end-to-end as a Licensed Real Estate Agent — 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, maintaining an active license in good standing and 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 — the first screen members saw upon logging in — designing and usability-testing fully responsive layouts for a health system serving 12+ million members.
- Contributed to the team's design style guide and worked on the appointment scheduling system, facilitating working sessions with clinical and business stakeholders and maintaining ADA-compliant accessibility documentation.
Senior User Experience Designer — The Walt Disney Studios
- Defined end-to-end UX strategy and developed interactive prototypes for the residual payments system — a high-volume, deadline-driven process where accuracy directly affected whether talent and rights holders were paid correctly.
- Reduced payment errors and delays, and facilitated stakeholder alignment through user research and usability testing.
- Designed the interface for the music group's content management system, which distributed music content to platforms including Pandora, Spotify, and Amazon Music.
- Contributed to the team's design style guide, 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 an internal content management system for the ALEKS adaptive-learning platform, 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.
- Created intuitive interface designs and led usability tests using rapid prototyping across K-12, higher-ed, and consumer markets, 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, and earned a networking certification to support the work.
- Pioneered the use of prototyping tools at the company for low- and mid-fidelity prototyping, and conducted usability tests and on-site research at large corporations and universities to see how they implemented the systems, meeting design and behavioral specifications for control interfaces.
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
- Founded and ran a custom Harley-Davidson wheel company, designing and building its website end-to-end while operating the business, and designed freelance websites for a hair stylist, a psychologist, and a mental health nurse practitioner.
- As a consultant for a company called Data Science, built a fully functioning prototype of their flagship product ahead of it being market-ready, enabling the team to demo it at a trade show.
M.A. Psychology — Human Factors
California State University, Northridge
B.A. Psychology — Minor, Child Development
California State University, Chico
What colleagues and clients say
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."