DESIGNER · LEADER · COLLABORATOR
James
Richman
Building teams, shaping products, and caring about the people on both sides of the screen.
DESIGNER · LEADER · COLLABORATOR
Building teams, shaping products, and caring about the people on both sides of the screen.
Director of Product Experience at OpenSesame. Founding designer & Creative Director at FloQast, Design lead at Disney, NBC, and the LA Times. I build products people love and the teams that love building them.
Born and raised in LA, living in the PNW. I spend my time in nature and my workshop with family, friends and dogs. Obsessed with burritos (traditional, breakfast, & sushi), good coffee, and anything handmade.
I still open Figma. I still sweat the details. Being a director doesn't mean you stop making things — it means you raise the bar for everyone around you.
I don't design screens, I design systems. Whether it was a design language for 140 Disney apps or a component library at a fast-growing fintech, I think in patterns. One-offs don't scale.
I've built teams across design, research, analytics, copy, and product enablement. The discipline doesn't matter as much as the environment you build around it.
I tie design decisions to outcomes — revenue, retention, conversion. Good design creates a great user experience as well as impacts the bottom line.
Everything starts with understanding the person on the other end. I've run research programs that changed product direction and saved teams from shipping the wrong thing.
Good strategy and good design ask the same first question: who is this for? I've spent my career at the intersection of both — helping teams get clear on direction before they get busy with execution.
Token Drift catches design system drift as a Chrome extension that audits any web page's styles against your design tokens, and a Figma plugin that audits a file and fixes the drift in place.
Fabric Spec is a sewing reference I built because I couldn't find one place with confident needle, thread, and stitch settings for the fabrics I use. It's a dependency-free static progressive web app where the whole catalog lives in a single markdown file.
Try itGSD is a responsive personal productivity app built with Next.js, Supabase, and Tailwind, featuring Google and Apple OAuth and a clean three-level task hierarchy of categories, lists, and items.
Try it
I lead product experience across three product lines at OpenSesame, a digital learning company. My team includes designers, researchers, analysts, and product enablement specialists. I report to the VP of Product and operate as a design voice at the executive level. Most of the work right now sits at the intersection of AI and learning, which is exactly where I want to be.
I was employee number 12 and the first designer. I built the design function from the ground up, the design system, the product UX, and eventually the physical headquarters. The company grew from a small startup to a $1B+ unicorn while I was there. I also co-hosted a podcast with the CEO, which taught me a lot about telling a company's story out loud.
Disney had 140+ internal applications built over 20 years with no shared design language. I was brought in to fix that. Creating a system that could scale across a portfolio that large, with that many stakeholders, is one of the harder problems I've worked on.
Design lead for the Tribune Publishing iOS app redesign, which covered the LA Times, Chicago Tribune, and eight other markets. The products reached a billion page views a year from over 100 countries.
Digital creative and strategy for entertainment properties including Marvel, Sony, Disney, FX, AMC, and Showtime. This is where I learned to work fast, stay curious, and never be precious about ideas.
Five years as design lead at NBC. I co-built the first design system at the network, which is still in use today. I worked on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Parks and Rec, and the streaming service that eventually became Peacock. I also won two Emmy Awards, which my mom reminds me of regularly.
Got an idea, a question, or a strong opinion about kerning? Let's talk.
jrichman138@gmail.com →I was the first designer at FloQast. Given an existing application built on Bootstrap with conflicting UI patterns, 34 different shades of navy blue, and navigation that led nowhere — I rebuilt it from the ground up into a system that could scale.
The LA Times was always a dream job of mine. I love the idea of helping people better understand the world around them. When I was brought on, I was tasked with redesigning the mobile app — applied not only to the LA Times but also to the Chicago Tribune, Hartford Courant, and several other Tribune Publishing outlets.
One of the biggest challenges we faced was engagement. Time in app was in a bad spot and reviews in the app store were hovering around 2 stars.
First step in any redesign is taking stock of what is working and what is not. Analytics told us that people would read an article, skim through a few headlines and exit. Photo and video stories — which had high ad revenue value — were almost completely skipped over. The good news was that the same articles tested better on desktop with higher engagement. It was clear that articles needed to be more engaging and that we needed an easy way to transition from one story to the next, as well as a better way to showcase the content.
This user spends between 60–90 minutes on public transportation Monday through Friday. Their primary focus is to be informed and they tend to be a more advanced user. Topics of interest include world news, local news, business, and sports. They are not likely to follow a push notification unless it is a major news event.
This user strives to be informed on a range of topics including world news, breaking news, and 2–3 other areas of interest. They check the app 10–12 times per day and expect to find new stories each time. They are likely to want push notifications and will follow them into the app.
This user tends to open the app when they have time to kill — standing in line, waiting for something, or just bored. Sections of interest tend to be local in nature. They are not likely to follow a push notification unless it is a major news event.
The existing flow was focused on the user scrolling a news section, selecting an article, then returning to the section list to find the next one. There was no sense of discovery or real gesture control.
I wanted to address the back-and-forth between articles. My assumption was that if someone was in a particular section — World News, Lifestyle, Sports — they had a general interest and would want an easy flow through stories. I added two new ways to move between articles: side-swipe to the next article, or let the next story begin automatically at the bottom of the current one. This opened up a much more natural way to browse.
I created wires based on a hypothesis that exposing the navigation at the top of the screen and allowing for side scrolling would allow for an easier experience than opening a menu. We also tested this on the article page — allowing a user to side scroll from one story to another. The new navigation tested great and it was on to creating a better showcase for our content.
We knew images always drove longer engagement than just a headline. We took the images and made them 75% of the screen. Any photo-heavy or video articles used the full screen to display imagery. We tested a few visual designs and ended on what you see below. The end result was increased engagement and time in app — even more significant on video and photo articles.
When I came to NBC, it was a collection of 30 or so show sites with mismatched UI, varying navigation patterns and no real cohesion between shows. My job was to create a template system that unified the experience while still allowing the personality of each show to shine through.
I was asked by our CEO to take an empty 20,000 sqft warehouse and turn it into the future headquarters of FloQast. With a budget of $1.25 million and 5 months, I designed our space.
TCX was a social network for creatives, focused around collaboration and showcasing their work.
About 4 years ago I bought a sander and a miter saw. My goal was to expand my design skills outside of the digital space. From that time I've spent a lot of time working with new materials and pushing my skills to build and create all sorts of things.
A selection of logos and brands I've worked on — from entertainment and music to restaurants and boutique publishers.
I was brought on to Disney to create a design system for roughly 120 internal applications — and a companion website so anyone in the organization could self-serve the system, understand the principles, and access all assets.
