About
I design with people, for people.
About Chris Hays
I came into UX in the early days of the web, worked at two design firms and some smaller agencies, went independent for five years, then joined Cynergy in 2010 to lead small teams on enterprise projects for Fortune 500 clients. KPMG acquired Cynergy in 2014, and I came along with it. What I expected to be a transition became more than a decade leading UX inside the consulting side of a Big Four firm.
What I’m proudest of is the careers of the designers I’ve coached. As a Performance Management Leader, I was formally responsible for the growth and advocacy of no more than two designers at a time. Small enough to actually know them, and to do the harder work: telling someone honestly where they needed to develop, then helping them get there. As Craft Advisor, I led a cohort of six to eight, one of the ways those of us who came over from Cynergy carried our craft-led roots into a Big Four firm. The cohort voted to name themselves Design S. Pumpkins, after the immersive Halloween haunt that’s been my longest-running user research project, eighteen Octobers and counting.
I came up through design and front-end development. I still open Figma every week. I never want to stop making things. The “designer at heart” line on the home page is how I keep the leadership work honest. I can’t ask a designer to hold a hard line on a build partner or an AI interaction if I haven’t done the equivalent work recently enough to know what I’m asking. Staying in the craft is what lets me be useful when the work gets hard.
Twenty years has taught me that the hardest UX work at this scale happens upstream of the product, in the rooms where decisions get made, with engineering, product owners, and the build-side teams. Getting design into those rooms is what I’ve gotten good at. So is making sure what comes out is the kind of thing users actually want to use.
From the field
Research in the dark
You can't interview someone who's running from a chainsaw.
Most recently I led UX teams at KPMG. Open to conversations about what’s next.
I’m based in the DC/Baltimore metro area and work remotely with teams anywhere. You can reach me at hays@noestudios.com, or find me on LinkedIn.
