I'M
JOHN
DONOHOE.
INTENSELY CURIOUS
UX DESIGN & STRATEGY LEADER
Welcome and thank you for stopping by!
Over the past 20+ years, I’ve honed my craft in UX strategy, design, and execution at large SaaS companies, like Salesforce, and in design agencies working with the world's most popular brands. This site offers a glimpse into the journey, lessons, and growth that have shaped my career.
Below, you’ll find answers to some of the most common questions I receive.
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How I Got Started: A micro origin story
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Leadership Approach: My philosophy in guiding teams
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Most Satisfaction: Experiences that get me excited
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Growing Others: How I approach mentoring
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Future of UX: My thoughts on what’s next in design
UX and product design aren't just my profession—they're my passion. I was initially drawn to UX design by the exciting challenges that aligned with my unique strengths, and that excitement has only grown over time.
If you’d like to chat or collaborate, I’d be thrilled to hear from you. Feel free to reach out.
How I Got Started
My father moved the family to California in the late 1970s when the computer culture of Silicon Valley was gaining traction. He sold mainframe computers and he had the technology bug bigger than anyone. He raised a family of “early adopters” before that was even a term.
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From a young age, I was fascinated by both imaginative play and mechanical workings. Whether it was film, illustration, carpentry, or any discipline that fused creativity with a logical, systematic approach, I found myself drawn to the interplay between inspiration and execution.
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During the first dot-com boom, I stood out as one of the few “creatives” that also had a foot in development. This dual passion led me to the emerging field of User Experience (UX), then often referred to as Information Architecture. UX was uniquely the perfect blend of art and technology, which served as the vital connective tissue bridging many different disciplines.
Leadership Approach
As a product design leader, I believe the best work from teams arises in environments that encourage healthy tensions. These opposing forces, when navigated thoughtfully, can encourage collaboration, drive innovation, and generate growth.
A few examples of such healthy tensions specific to UX include:
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Balancing aspirational visions with the need to refine and optimize the present.
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Advocating for the user while aligning with business objectives and technical constraints.
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Giving creatives the freedom to explore while ensuring alignment with a unified vision.
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Allocating time for research while addressing the urgency to getting to market.
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Ensuring accessibility without sacrificing cutting-edge design.
Healthy tensions work to provide an equilibrium of perspectives resulting in solutions that are both pragmatic and imaginative. When leadership is transparent about the need for such tensions, I have found it to be effective in building stronger teams, delivering more meaningful work, and achieving success across multiple metrics.
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Most Satisfaction
Some of my most rewarding career moments have been creating near-future designs and seeing them come to life. While I enjoy crafting aspirational, boundary-pushing visions, I find the great satisfaction in bridging the present with the next big leap. These design “maps” are powerful tools that align stakeholders and teams around clear, actionable objectives, driving shared success.
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At Salesforce, I led design initiatives that helped shape the future of the $120+ billion SaaS company. Highlights include explorations integrating Slack and Sales Cloud after the $27 billion acquisition and concepting the Salesforce Starter Suite (formerly Salesforce Easy), shifting Salesforce toward a product-led growth strategy. These experiences demonstrated the power of clear, consumable concepts in driving innovation and tangible results.
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During my years in design consulting and agency work I drove initiatives for a wide range of brands such as Logitech, OpenTable, Ellen Degeneres, and others.
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Navigating complex, interdepartmental initiatives often requires overcoming misaligned objectives. Here, design and storytelling are vital for building shared understanding, aligning teams, and turning ambitious visions into reality.
Growing Others
Managing and mentoring dozens of designers has taught me that everyone, including myself, is on a journey that never ends.
I came of age professionally as the UX field was first being defined, and my career reflects a pattern of identifying gaps in my knowledge or skills and embracing the challenge to figure them out.
The most transformative technique I’ve discovered with my reports and mentees is helping them recognize both their superpowers and growth areas. I encourage them to lean into their strengths while acknowledging and addressing their gaps. Together, we focus on strategies for future improvement, paired with celebrating of who they are today.
Accepting where we need to grow and honoring who we are in the moment are among the most powerful gifts a person can cultivate on their journey.
Future of UX
Anyone who has spent time in the tech sector knows that “the only constant is change.”
UX design, in particular, has evolved uniquely - growing through methodologies like design thinking, Agile UX, and design sprints, while expanding across platforms from mobile apps to environmental service design, VR/AR, and beyond.
Now, the focus is shifting to the future of UX with AI: both in designing AI-driven experiences and leveraging AI as a tool to create those experiences.
AI in Our UX Experiences
This is an incredibly exciting time for UX designers who’ve dreamt of intelligent systems that adapt to users’ needs and deliver tailored, goal-oriented experiences. Ideas that up until recently seemed far fetched, even in brainstorming sessions, are now becoming reality.
One of the most transformative breakthroughs in AI is its ability to produce outputs that “feel” real enough to instill confidence in users. Each of us carries our own version of a Turing Test when interacting with these systems, and the response to Generative AI has been overwhelmingly positive. Businesses have spoken: GenAI is good enough for widespread adoption.
However, this confidence comes with risks. Just because AI output “feels” right doesn’t mean it is. Flawed datasets can perpetuate bias and amplify misinformation, presenting serious challenges. As designers, we have a responsibility to minimize harm. A guiding product design principle I live by is: “Make it easy to do the right thing, and hard to do the wrong thing.”
While prescriptive machine learning, such as scoring and recommendations, has been around for years, we are entering a new era of accessible AI. Generative AI enables more conversational, freeform interactions between humans and machines, opening up possibilities we’re only beginning to explore. The proliferation of open AI platforms has also democratized innovation, making these capabilities available to everyone.
For designers eager to learn and create, this is a fascinating and transformative moment. I feel incredibly fortunate to be part of this journey.
AI as a Tool to Create UX Experiences
In the daily life of a UX designer, tools powered by AI holds immense potential to revolutionize workflows. The possibility of generating design artifacts from simple prompts, developing design permutations for automated A/B testing, and analyzing data to uncover behaviors that would be nearly impossible to detect manually are now within our grasp.
One particularly exciting prospect is AI’s ability to identify and address a designer's personal biases that inevitably influence our work. Bias is an inherent part of being human, even for the most seasoned designers, and tools that can surface and mitigate it would be transformative.
These advancements provide powerful opportunities to serve audiences better. Yet, some things remain constant. Discernment and empathy are as crucial as ever. For now, the distinctly human quality of determining appropriate strategy is something AI has yet to replicate.
While tools for faster output generation continue to evolve, the responsibility for strategy, deciding what outputs are needed and understanding their purpose, will remain firmly in the hands of UX designers.
Let’s Connect
As you can probably tell, I’m passionate about UX and product design. This subject fascinates me beyond the professional realm, and I enjoy connecting with others who share this interest.
If you’d like to chat, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or via email.
