I had the pleasure of working with Jacob during his tenure as a UX Designer at Inkling. He was instrumental in creating comprehensive designs and experiences across multiple products, and his contributions were critical to our success. Jacob’s pragmatic and process-oriented approach ensured that he achieved the right results efficiently. His ability to focus on driving outcomes through well-defined methods, while also having the flexibility to jump in and contribute to new projects or meet tight deadlines, was truly impressive. I always appreciated his candor, customer obsession, and dedication to his craft. His insights and collaborative spirit made a significant impact on our team. Working with Jacob was a great experience and I would gladly do so again.
I had the pleasure of having Jacob as part of my team when I lead the Customer Success teams at Inkling. He reported to one of my direct reports. Jacob had a broad range of strengths which will make him a valued member of any design or product team. His core design skill-set is world class. His ability to take complex ideas and situations and simplify them into great design was critical to our team's success. He could take a complex, extensive, and highly variable set of customer documents, brand assets, and templates and boil them down to the essence of the customer brand and then turn this essence into a beautiful set up brand concepts and templates. An important aspect of Jacob's success was his flexible, empathetic communication style. I trusted Jacob in any customer situation and knew that he would handle these situations effectively and our relationship with the customer would be stronger because Jacob was involved. Finally, Jacob works hard and has a can-do attitude that is means he will be a key contributor to any team. You never hear "that is not my job" from Jacob. At different times, our design team was under staffed and Jacob always picked up the slack. His great attitude during these times combined with high work output helped us be successful in several challenging staffing situations. Overall, Jacob would be an invaluable member of ay team and I cannot recommend him more highly.
I've worked with Jacob the past five years, first during his tenure as a front-end designer and then the last couple years as he made the jump to full-time UX Designer. We closely collaborated on several features that had been long standing customers pain points, including improving the web to printed experience for complex content. Jacob's thorough customer-centered research approach with a deep technical understanding of the complexities of web-based content allowed him to design an iterative solution that was quick to implement for the engineering team and provide customer value rapidly. Throughout the process, he also worked closely with the customers to make changes to their designs that improved their content to match their web and print needs. His partnership with product and engineering was consistently fueled by a deep understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of web-based applications. Collaborating with Jacob was a pleasure as he approached all challenges with an open-mind and a desire to find the best solutions given the limitations of time and technology.