Karl Schultz

Email:  uxkarl@gmail.com   |   Portfolio:  uxkarl.com   |   LinkedIn profile:  Karl Schultz   |   New York, NY

• 53K+ monthly active users on Coalition Control, the risk management platform I helped design as its first Product Designer
• $2M+ in new premium generated within 90 days by a broker collaboration model I researched and designed
• ~66% fewer UI components required after I led the audit and build-out of Macy's first component library (from ~75 down to ~25)
• +11% conversion lift from a Macy's checkout redesign across desktop, mobile, and tablet

Senior Product Designer & Product Research Lead

Coalition, Inc.

Nov 2019 – Feb 2024

• As the first Product Designer assigned to Coalition's newly formed Control team, I helped translate acquired attack-surface monitoring and threat-intelligence capability into a risk management product experience for policyholders, brokers, and security teams — now used by 53K+ monthly active users.
• Led broker research and interaction design for a collaboration model that lets wholesale brokers authorize retail brokers to quote and bind through Coalition's platform, calibrating access to broker confidence rather than a single, fixed permission model — generating ~1.2K broker pairings and $2M+ in new premium within 90 days.
• Built Coalition's user research practice from zero to one, conducting policyholder and broker interviews, card sorting, and task-completion studies that shaped Control's information architecture and navigation model around how users actually thought about risk.
• Designed risk-mitigation workflows — dashboards, prioritized checklists, remediation guidance, self-help paths — that helped policyholders move from "here's a vulnerability" to "here's what to do about it."
• Contributed to design-system adoption, UX QA, hiring, and mentorship as Coalition scaled from roughly 75 to 750+ employees.

Principal UX Designer & Senior UX Designer

Macys.com (Macys, Inc.)

Oct 2014 – May 2018

• Noticed a gap nobody owned — design and engineering had drifted into ~75 redundant UI components — and self-initiated a task force to fix it: brought in an outside OOUX consultant, audited actual usage, and rebuilt around ~25 governed components, cutting required components ~66% and defining rules for when to extend versus create new ones so the system wouldn't re-fragment.
• Guided an example-led adoption strategy — building real components in partnership with developers before asking the wider org to adopt them — because removing real pain for both designers and engineers proved an easier sell than a top-down mandate.
• Redesigned checkout flows across desktop, mobile, and tablet, applying WCAG 2.0 AA standards and funnel analysis to lift conversion +11%.
• Applied Object-Oriented UX methodology to structure complex retail experiences and mentored junior designers on evidence-based design decision-making.

Earlier Experience

• Senior UX Designer, Razoo Global Network / Mightycause (2013 – 2014) — Led Lean Startup adoption and user research for nonprofit fundraising and activism products.
• Manager, UX Design, CBS Interactive (2008 – 2009) — Led a cross-disciplinary team of designers, contractors, and interns for broadcast media digital experiences.
• Senior UX Designer, CNET Networks (2006–2008) — Designed and launched consumer electronics product finders from zero to one, driving +10K visits and +84K page views daily.

Designed and prototyped a concept-validated Generative AI Broker Assistant for cyber insurance quote comparison, using broker feedback, instructor review, academic critique, and potential-user feedback to explore explainable recommendations, weighting controls, transparent decision support, and human oversight in high-stakes broker workflows. (Stanford Engineering Online AI UX Design Essentials capstone.)

Featured as a case study in Cindy Alvarez's “Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy”.