Amanda SchmutzlerUser Experience designer
who makes complicated
systems feel simple.
16+ years designing trusted
experiences across e-commerce,
financial services, healthcare, media,
ed-tech, and consumer electronics.
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, including 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. 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 User Experience 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, so details here focus on problem, process, and impact.
Rebuilding Brand Portfolio, Walmart Marketplace's permissions system
Third-party brand owners were central to Walmart's Marketplace business, but the Brand Portfolio tool controlling who on a seller's team could edit content, manage listings, and use marketing tools hadn't kept pace, so I rebuilt that permissions system from the ground up.
$250M incremental brand GMV · 5.7M branded products impacted
View 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 took days to resolve, too slow against catalogs with dozens of look-alikes. I replaced it with a guided, self-serve wizard for reporting listings across multiple sellers in one pass.
Resolution time cut from a multi-day process to one guided flow
View 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, validated inside a highly regulated, ADA-compliant clinical environment.
12.5M+ members served · 4 access paths unified into 1
View case study
Racecar Build
Racecar Build is a construction management platform for the residential new-construction marketplace, spanning a web app, iPad and iPhone field apps for crews, and customer and stakeholder apps, all unified by one style guide and shared flows built from user personas.
5 platforms unified into 1 shared system · 4 user roles served
View case studyA closer look at the range beyond the four flagship case studies above — smaller projects and explorations spanning healthcare, ed-tech, entertainment, financial services, and consumer web.
True Haven Mental Health
A telehealth psychiatric practice website covering services, pricing, and online booking, built end to end with Claude AI.
Dealer Funding Platform
Design manager on Capital One's funding platform, streamlining car-buying and financing for dealers and customers.
Appointment Scheduling
Streamlines appointment scheduling for Kaiser members across web and mobile, validated through moderated usability testing.
Welcome Page
A regional-aware welcome page that greets members and tailors their experience to their local care network.
Documentation Project
Documented every component in the Kaiser design system, giving engineering and design teams one consistent reference to build from.
HEX Style Guide
The Walt Disney Studios' shared design system, giving every team a single source of truth for components, patterns, and UI behavior.
Residuals
ReRun ensures Walt Disney Studios' talent are paid residuals accurately and on time, cutting billions in late fees each year.
ALEKS PPL
Placement, Preparation & Learning places incoming students into the right math class based on their skills.
ALEKS CMS
Internal system for authoring, editing, and storing 40,000+ learning algorithms, managed end to end by content teams.
Car Dashboard Design Exercise
A touchscreen in-vehicle cockpit concept, replacing physical controls with one unified digital dashboard.
My Looking Glass
Beauty tips, tutorials, and a mirror, camera, and photo editor with shareable community groups.
Styled Wheels
Co-founded a custom motorcycle wheel company and built its online checkout, processing live payments.
How I lead through complexity
Most of my career has lived inside systems where the user need is only one input among many — marketplace trust & safety at Walmart, regulated financial workflows at Capital One, clinical compliance at Kaiser. Design work in those environments means constantly translating between legal, compliance, engineering, and the person on the other end of the screen who just wants their problem solved simply. The throughline across 16+ years of that work: the fastest way through complexity isn't moving faster, it's aligning earlier.
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.
As Design Manager at Capital One, I led and mentored designers on the auto loan business, running regular hands-on critique sessions to raise the bar on craft and strategic thinking, and represented the design team directly in cross-functional planning with product and engineering leadership. That same leadership carried into my Principal roles: at Walmart Marketplace, I served as the primary design point of contact across a large, complex organization, aligning brand-partner stakeholders and driving decisions through a full redesign of the Brand Portal; at Kaiser Permanente, I facilitated working sessions with clinical and business stakeholders to align a health system serving 12+ million members around a unified care experience.
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 & User Experience Standards
- Cross-Platform User Experience Design
- Accessibility & Inclusive Design
- Concept Validation & Iterative Design
Tools & AI
- Figma & FigJam
- Adobe Creative Cloud
- Confluence & Jira
- Miro & Maze
- ChatGPT, Claude, Google Stitch, Nano Banana & Meta Muse
- Figma AI & Figma Make
- Agentic AI Workflows & AI-Augmented 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
- Defined the User Experience 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.
- 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.
- Directed user research and usability testing with brand partners, drove User Experience 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.
- Shaped the brand owner experience across Walmart Marketplace, a two-sided marketplace where brand owners drove 60% of total Marketplace GMV.
- Grew brand registrations 4x over two years by designing backwards from brand owner and seller needs, scaling the brand program from an early-stage initiative into a core Marketplace growth driver.
- Designed the brand onboarding, discovery, and tooling experiences behind $250M in incremental brand GMV, validating design decisions against KPIs through experimentation and data-driven iteration.
- As part of the Trust & Safety product team, helped design the support chatbot for Walmart's agentic, GenAI-powered merchant assistant, giving merchandising teams answers to operational questions through natural-language conversation.
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.
- Designed the experience for Fast Funding, a work stream within the dealer funding process focused on speeding up how quickly dealerships received payment after a deal closed.
- 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.
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 touch points.
- Worked on the appointment scheduling system, facilitating working sessions with clinical and business stakeholders and producing UI and User Experience comps and interactive prototypes grounded in user research and usability testing.
Senior User Experience Designer — The Walt Disney Studios
- Defined end-to-end User Experience 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 loosely defined 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.
- Ran 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 and presentations, synthesizing raw observations and quotes into recurring usability themes and recommendations that clients used to guide design and product decisions.
Freelance Designer — Self-Employed
- Built and designed the website for True Haven Mental Health, a telehealth psychiatric practice, using Claude AI, covering services and pricing, and linking out to SimplePractice and Headway for online booking.
- 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 a freelance site for a hair stylist.
- As a consultant for a company called Data Science, built a fully functioning prototype of their flagship product in Axure, well before AI design tools existed, 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
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 she 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."
The 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."
The 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. She's a flexible worker and an asset to the team."
Data Science
"Talented designer and team player who was 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."
