Brandon E. B. Ward.

I'm Brandon. I've spent my career building and running design practices: at four startups in the early 2000s, two design and digital agencies in the middle stretch, a senior consulting run after that, and at Precocity for the last decade. Every one of those jobs started with the same sentence: “We don't have a UX practice yet. Build one.”

The first startup was an e-learning organization I salvaged from dilution when the Director of Production abruptly quit, building the team, bringing everything in-house. The second was a small e-commerce platform where I learned to ship in a small room with engineers who outranked me and a CEO who wanted to sue me to stay when I left. The third was an early-to-market video search platform with all the promise and an unscrupulous CEO. The fourth taught me that products that lead with great design, built on solid software, are worth millions.

The agency years were the years I learned to run a creative team. The consulting years after were the ones where I learned to run a creative team inside a business that didn't think of itself as a creative one. At Precocity I joined as the first UX hire and spent ten years growing the practice into the discipline that closes the firm's enterprise contracts. That case study is the big one. If you read nothing else here, read that.

During that run I was retained as the UX and user-research expert witness in FTC v. Match.com. Nobody gets called as an expert witness for a practice that isn't taken seriously. Alongside the day job I co-founded the Dallas chapter of the Service Design Network, which has grown to roughly 5,000 members, and won the bid to host its 2025 global conference.

Lately, that same build-the-thing-that-isn't-there instinct has turned into shipping my own tools:

• Speakeazy (live, real users)
• FORGE (a content-driven, AI-powered IA, UX, UI, and Build tool)
• Verity (a comprehensive UX Research platform)
• RAD (a visualization and reporting tool for moderated usability studies)
• Marksman (a macOS Markdown converter mini-app Precocity uses internally for AI projects)
• Design Library Showcase Generator (a Figma plugin to help you instantly create a showcase of all library components and their variants)

Honestly, the tools matter to me more as proof than as products. I have a hard time trusting a design leader who hasn't made anything with their own hands in five years. A painting, a teapot, a chair, an app, I don't care what. The tools have changed a lot since 2001. What it takes to make something good hasn't.

The short version: I build design practices from scratch, or take an existing team and turn it up to 11. I do the strategy, the creative direction, and the hands-on production, and unlike most people with my title, I still ship in the new tools every week.

I live in Dallas. I write here occasionally. I love kung fu, classic cars, singing, acting, teaching, traveling, husbanding, and fathering.