Skip to content
Christopher LaRoseDirector of UX & Strategy

Chaos to clarity

UX, strategy and the systems behind them.

Director of UX & Strategy
Elegant Seagulls

Auburn Hills, Michigan
· Working remotely

15 years · 200+ clients · scroll ↓

01 / Introduction

I started out running a digital arts room at the Boys & Girls Club. Now I’m leading an agency’s AI rollout.

fig. 1 — 11,984 characters, one face

Trained

BFA, Graphic Communications, NMU · Best in Show

Recognized

Awwwards Developer Award, 2015 · Teen Impact Awards

Remote since

2014, as Elegant Seagulls’ first remote hire

Community

Boys & Girls Club kid · PTO president

I’m Chris LaRose, Director of UX & Strategy at Elegant Seagulls. It’s challenging and rewarding work to develop a system from an interconnected and often tangled state. It’s exciting to address stakeholders’ needs while making the end result simple to use and simple to run. These days that includes deciding what AI should do, what it shouldn’t and how to integrate it into workflows for real-world results.

02 / Selected work

A—1

Quest Nutrition
2018–2022
UX · Shopify · ADA

Fix the foundation first.

A speed audit that turned into a four-year partnership, through Quest’s acquisition by Simply Good Foods.

+99%

Overall conversions

A—2

Michigan Herp Atlas
2021–2025
Design · WordPress · Freelance

A conservation database that runs on volunteers.

A statewide database of Michigan’s reptiles and amphibians, built so anyone who spots one can add a record.

37,000+

Records in the atlas

A—3

GovCIO
2020–2025
IA · UX · Strategy

Rebuild the structure, not just the look.

Two sites for GovCIO: the company site, and Media & Research, a news source for federal technology leaders with years of articles, podcasts, events and eBooks behind it.

+322%

Website visitors

A—4

Verint
2020–present
IA · UX · WordPress

Index everything before moving anything.

Rebuilding a 100+ product site without losing the search traffic it had already earned.

+400%

PageSpeed score

A—5

Audible
2021–2023
UX · Strategy · Design · Prototypes

One system. Three quizzes.

Gifting and evergreen quizzes, and a Gift Center for listeners, newcomers and everyone shopping for them.

82,582

Trial sign-ups

A—6

The Creekside Record
2026
Design · AI · Personal

A real newspaper for a town that isn’t.

A local paper for Bellwether, MI, a town that doesn’t exist, designed in Figma and built with Claude Code.

20+

People surprised and curious

03 / Project Log

Plus 170-some more for small and mid-sized businesses, nonprofits, hospitals and local shops all over the country.

View all 38 projects →

04 / About

Jack of all trades,
master of none?

For a while, that was me. I got into this industry to put my own creative work on the web, and stayed because design, development and working with people all scratch the same itch. When React and headless CMSs took over, I chose UX and strategy, built on everything design and development taught me.

More about me →

Off the clock

Imaginary Postcards is where I make things for myself: music, photography, cyanotypes, zines, whatever’s pulling at me.

imaginarypostcards.studio ↗