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Ben Clemens Product Design Work

Ben Clemens

I’m a design leader motivated by making & delivering new products—through excellence, empathy, and growing with the people I work with.

In the companies and teams I have been privileged enough to work with I have played many roles, from sole designer to product manager to director. In every situation I focus on building strong teams, getting things done, and fearlessly pursuing success. I love finding and growing designers, teaching people new skills, doing deep research, fostering a creative environment, building prototypes, and rolling up my sleeves to contribute my own ideas.

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A “pattern” approach to design systems.

A design system is something every product team needs or uses (or plans to make), but that means very different things to different teams!


Also published as an article in Smashing Magazine “Design Patterns Are A Better Way To Collaborate On Your Design System”

For small teams, a design system can seem confining or like “extra” work or design debt, and for larger companies, it can be tricky to decide when to creatively extend a design system.  Here’s what I think is a durable and useful way to think about design systems to avoid those pitfalls.

Philo

A live TV service that offers a better experience and 60+ cable channels for $25/month.

Design/launch of new streaming TV service, from zero to 1m+ subscribers on platforms including Roku, iOS, tvOS, FireTV, Android, and web. Scaled from sole designer role (I took the photograph you see above, for the landing page) to managing a team of 8 talented designers. Led product and marketing design, visual branding, and helped grow the overall company from 12 to 100+.

Card Sort Tool

A home-made tool for remote UX research.

When we had need of a card sort for a UX research study, I and the other product designers at Philo (Rachelle Miller and Jane Slaughter) created an online card sort tool. In the future any UX researcher will be able to use it!


InstaEdu

A lesson-space for an online tutoring marketplace.

Product design work for finding a tutor and the lesson space, for an online tutoring and homework help service. I did both design and development (markup, style, javascript for the UI). InstaEdu grew so strongly that it was acquired after about a year by Chegg.