GET TO KNOW ME

Hi, I’m Ryan Palm, a UX/UI designer who’s spent the last decade+ designing digital experiences across a wide range of products and industries.

I’m currently a UX/UI Designer II and design lead on my product team at the University of Phoenix, where I help shape core parts of the student experience. Lately, my focus has been on rethinking and transforming the college programs experience, where I make complex, high-stakes decisions feel clearer, more human, and easier to navigate. Prior to my time working in this higher-intent space, I worked on our college application, onboarding contact strategy with our email team and also focused on areas related to the about us experience on phoenix.edu.

I also volunteer for our accessibility working group within the university. Being disabled in both visible and invisible ways is something that could happen to anyone at any time. We owe it to our students and employees alike to further develop a community and set of experiences that is inclusive to those who otherwise would have been left out. Accessibility considerations like clear hierarchy, readable contrast, keyboard navigation, and assistive technology support are part of how I think about good UX, not an afterthought.

Before that, I designed digital experiences at places like PGA TOUR, where performance, brand, and scale all mattered equally, and iContact, where I lived deep in the realities of email design, building hundreds of responsive templates, shipping campaigns to lists with over 2 million subscribers, and learning firsthand how messy real-world rendering constraints can be.

My career started in graphic and web design. I still care deeply about craft, but years of product work have taught me that clarity beats clever, usability beats aesthetics, and constraints usually make the work better. I’m comfortable moving from discovery and strategy to high-fidelity design and into development-ready solutions, collaborating closely with engineers and stakeholders along the way.

When I’m not designing, I love spending time with my wife, our son, and our dog Bandit (he’s a corgi, yes they are awesome). I also have a passion for music and have played guitar and bass in many bands. No genre is too weird for me!

I'd love to connect with you on linkedin.