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What’s life without a little Whimsy?
Whimsy is your creative mind’s playground.
-Me
Hi, I’m Amy. I’m a user experience designer, innovator, creative problem solver, leader, and social media attempter.
Welcome to my portfolio and newly added blog. This site provides some of my background information in case you’d like to work with me. I’m also adding a blog because I have learned a lot over the years, and continue to learn so I have a lot to share.
You can also follow me on social media where I’ll be adding some backstories on Woolsey Workshop tutorials as well as insights to my blog. I’d love to hear your input.
Woolsey Workshop
Design & Test
Woolsey Workshop is an electronics and software tutorial website created by me and my husband, John. For each tutorial, I create a graphic to represent the topic and we use it at the top of the article. We think it’s more memorable and eye catching that way. Essentially, the graphic becomes the visual representation of that tutorial. I then use that graphic in all the marketing I send out.
John is the developer behind the articles and I review them before they are published. I take the reader’s perspective by actually building or coding everything the tutorial explains how to do.
Thank you to all who have written to us and made comments on the site. You make our day when you let us know that you appreciate the effort we put into creating these tutorials.
My background is actually in the semiconductor industry. I led problem solving teams that developed methodology and software solutions so that management could make better on-time decisions, increase productivity by 4x and reduce defects to nearly zero for the areas we focused on.
I believe that my teams succeeded because we focused on the people not the solutions we thought people needed. I learned of the concept of Design Thinking after having practiced it for years. I believe that the key to successful solutions is to first understand the problem from the perspective of the people who need or want the solutions you are creating.
I also had the best time leading an open innovation team for nearly 15 years called Free Your Mind. We enabled employees ideas that otherwise may never have seen the light of day. One of our CEO’s called my team the “bureaucracy busters”. What we really did was find ways to work within the rules and still do what we wanted to do, but I like the renegade title anyway.
The company name changed a lot, first Motorola, then the spin off called Freescale Semiconductor, then the buy out by NXP. But I stayed with the same team almost the entire time I was there, which is pretty amazing if you know anything about the semiconductor industry. I was honored to work with such great people. Great, great people. Shout out to them all.
Before and After Motorola
Pre-Motorola
Before I started at Motorola, I was a System Administrator for a pension company in Austin, Texas. I got the job at a time when I was hacking together bits and pieces to create my own computer. This was when you had to install drivers and plugin memory cards, video cards, etc. to the motherboard and your display was probably amber or green. Just like Motorola and Freescale I found my team had the most outstanding people in it. I’ve been so lucky.
I have also done quite a few websites over the years, both inside and outside of Motorola. Following are a couple of site examples:
New Project (So new, I’m not even done yet.)
I’m creating a site for UX Graz, a UX community in Graz, Austria. Because COVID-19 brought so many people online, I was fortunate to find them and become a very remote part of their team. They are another great group of people working toward more people friendly solutions.
Beautiful Vineyard Website
A few years back, I had the honor of remodeling the website for my relatives beautiful vineyard for its 10th Anniversary. Pictures don’t do it justice. You should really go in person.
They have it all, a beautiful space for parties, free weekend entertainment, buying online, wine tastings, and of course it’s dog friendly. Cheers!
More Whimsy
This is Karl Chemist. He’s a character I created for an app idea. These expressions are based on me, but Einstein was my original inspiration. I mean that HAIR!
Today, I’m focused on Woolsey Workshop in the hopes that my husband and I can continue sharing our love of electronics and the user experience full time. And I add whimsy where ever I can with fun graphics and hopefully soon some fun electronics projects.
I am, and always will be, a User Experience Designer. I’ve been one since before there was even a term or you could take courses for it. I look forward to connecting to more UX’rs around the world and sharing our experience and desire to create great design.