Jonathan Elbom

Who I Am

Hello! My name is Jonathan Elbom and I make extraordinary user experiences come to life.

I live at the intersection of the user, data, technology and design, and blend UX design and client-side web engineering expertise into a single progressive discipline. My focus on understanding user experience problems and technical capabilities enables me to craft compelling experiences that are intuitive, thoughtful, simple and delightful. My top priority is delivering a great experience for users by solving real-world problems. I approach UX with empathy and compassion.

Over the span of my 20 year career, I have spent my time as a designer, an engineer, an individual contributor, a manager, a mentor, a student, a teacher, a listener, a leader, and a champion for process improvements that close the gaps between teams in order to deliver world class user experiences.

I seek a positive environment where I’m surrounded by encouraging, hardworking and passionate multi-disciplinary teams who inspire each other to take their craft to the next level. I am a champion for the team, and believe that hard work and humility is the path to trust and respect.

What I've Done

2016 - Present

Since 2016, I have worked as a Sr. Design Technologist and Sr. Manager of Design Technology and UX Engineering at Vrbo. I am also a member of the Vrbo Design Systems team. I collaborate with other designers and engineers to created high-fidelity prototypes for usability labs as well as components for our production experience. I contribute to crafted user experiences from inception to production, specializing in complex users flows and motion and interaction rich experiences. I create production demos and consult teams around their UX design and implementation strategy. I hope you enjoy viewing this collection of work:

View Vrbo Portfolio

2011 - Present

In addition to Vrbo, I maintain one contract client, Dr Steven Grey (MSU), whom I partnered with in 2011 to create Mental Modeler, a fuzzy-logic cognitive mapping web application. Mental Modeler is comprised of a concept mapper and a scenario suite, both of which I designed and implemented. We have been awarded numerous grants, including a million dollar NSF Cyberlearning grant in 2012. The software is accessed by 50,000 users per year and has produced more the 40 academic publications in 2018 alone. The concept mapper was originally written in Actionscript 3 and I ported it to React/Redux in 2019. In addition, I created a utility site, MM Compare, for teachers to compare student models against a reference model and download an .xlsx spreadsheet with the comparision statistics. I also created 2 instructional/promotional websites for Mental Modeler.

View Mental Modeler

2001 - 2016

Prior to working at Vrbo, I worked at Pearson Education (2010 - 2016) on their high-stakes, summative assessment testing client (both Actionscript 3/Flex and HTML5). At Pearson, I also lead the design and UI development for ABBI, their high-stakes testing item creation tool. Before that, I reveled in the digital agency life at Springbox (2007-2010), delivering rich media experiences (aka ActionScript 3) to a host of clients including Disney, PayPal, LG, Nascar, Experien, and Dell. I considered my real start to be at Enspire Learning (2001 - 2007) where I made lasting connections with co-workers and got my footing as both a UX designer and an engineer. And, of course, all throughout my career, I have done a random project here or there, both for the love of creation and to learn.

View previous work