Don Bruns

DC-based UX Lead & Content Strategist 

About Me

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I'm a serial intrapreneur working at the intersection of Content Strategy & User Experience (UX).  

As a 20+ year veteran of digital world, I excel at leveraging the entire User Centered Design (UCD) toolkit to transform businesses for the digital landscape.  My specialties include:

I also run a tight, 10-minute stand-up meeting.  I love mentoring, co-leadership and leading without authority.  If your Kanban board is out of whack, I can triage it like nobody's business.  If you have a content strategy problem and I don't know the answer, I know somebody who does.  

My past clients have included USA.gov, FINRA, EY, KPMG, CFTC, USA.gov, Lockheed Martin, Novartis & the Departments of State, Justice, Treasury & Veterans Affairs.  I've worked for various digital agencies, both small and large, in a variety of roles.  I'm most happy when I'm applying the tools of UCD and Content Strategy to solve complex business problems.

My lovely wife, Samantha, and I live in Rockville, MD with two rambunctious cats.  I'm currently studying systematic theology & pastoral care at Wesley Theological Seminary.

My Portfolio

Here are a few of the projects I've led over the past 20+ years.  Have a question about anything listed here?  Please feel free to contact me at don@donbruns.net.

A global pharmaceutical research firm had developed a knowledge sharing portal, but few biomedical researchers were contributing to it.  Why weren't users adopting this new platform?  My team's research helped remove points of resistance and added value to enterprise content.

After emerging from bankrupcty, PC Magazine needed to cease its print publication and switch to a purely digital format. These wireframes helped PCMag rebrand its way to a Gold Addy award, and the redesign helped ensure the brand's survival into the 21st century. 

An eighty-year-old financial services firm had billions of dollars under administration, but no real digital presence.  My team performed requirements analysis, content strategy, rapid prototyping and several rounds of user research to help ensure a successful web site launch on Day One.

The Department of State wanted to streamline the security clearance process from 75 days to 30 days.  My team applied a combination of requirements analysis, workflow analysis, rapid prototyping & usability testing to streamline the investigative and adjudicative experience.

Pew Environment Group needed an overarching schema for categorizing and classifying their thousands of publications.  My team developed a flexible and robust taxonomy schema that would be viable for any CMS.

Compliance officers at Broker Dealer firms had a hard time keeping track of FINRA's varied and complex regulatory requirements.  I developed a content strategy that maintains dozens of self-curating, taxonomy-driven topic pages, each one capturing the full regulatory landscape of a particular subject.