Portrait of Rikki Teeters
Rikki Teeters

I design experiences that respect how people actually think, feel, and move through the world.

UX Designer· AI Experience Creator· Author of Conscious UX

Start with presence.

Fifteen years designing for humans. The last year, designing with AI, and asking whether the two have to mean the same thing.

I've spent my career learning how to listen: to users, to systems, to the quiet friction between what something looks like and how it actually feels to use. My path wasn't linear. It started with curiosity about human behavior, wound through teaching and mentorship, and landed in work where every pixel carries intention.

Design is care made visible. I teach because explaining forces clarity. I lead because good design needs protection. I make because creation is how I process the world.

Conscious UX is where all of that lives now: the research, the craft, the experiments, the films. Human designing for humans, with AI as the medium.

Currently

What I'm working on right now.

Speaking

Talking with teams about AI and design.

How AI is reshaping the practice, and how designers stay human-centered through the shift.

Community

Gathering designers, researchers, and writers around the book.

A growing community around the practice, and what comes next.

Day job

Designing for the people who run Amazon's largest organizations.

Sr. UX Designer & AI Design Leader, Manager Experiences. The systems, dashboards, and tools managers use every day.

Fifteen years in UX, one through-line.

2026–Present
Founder, Conscious UX Studio · Read the manifesto →
Opened the studio as a creative practice using AI as a medium for conscious design. Exploring Consciousness is a seventeen-thousand-film study through consciousness, space, and time. All of it is part of the practice.
2025
Author, Conscious UX
Wrote Conscious UX: Leading Human-Centered Design in the Age of AI, the methodology underneath the studio. Three pillars, nine principles, built on a year of interviews with 130 designers, researchers, and educators worldwide.
2018–Present · Amazon
Sr. UX Designer & UX Manager
Eight years leading design across Amazon's most human-facing products: Manager Experience, Whole Foods & Fresh, Amazon Ads, Prime Video, and Amazon Explore. Four-and-a-half of those years managing teams of designers, researchers, and writers.
2017–2020 · Miami University
Adjunct Professor, UX Design & Research
Designed and taught six undergraduate HCI courses from scratch, translating industry practice into foundations for the next generation of designers.
2013–2017 · VML (Rockfish)
Sr. UX Designer
Led UX on high-visibility digital products across teams. Championed user research, facilitated design sprints, and helped teams work through ambiguity.
2012–2013 · Cardinal Solutions
UX Designer & Researcher
User research and interaction design on client engagements across enterprise software and consumer web.
2010–2016 · IxDA
Regional Coordinator, North America
Managed 94 local interaction design groups across the US, Canada, and Mexico. Onboarded leaders, organized international workshops, and built community at scale.
2005–2014 · Hearts & Pixels
Founder & CEO
Designed human-centered apps, websites, and AR experiences to capture life's intimate moments. Consulted with companies to improve customer experiences from the ground up.
2009–2012 · NBCUniversal & 20th Century Studios
Design Intern → Product Designer
Where it began. Designing film campaigns for Bridesmaids and Paul at NBC, and style guides for Avatar and Alvin and the Chipmunks at Fox. Hollywood taught me that every frame is a design decision.
From the practice

Self-portraits in film.

Watch the collection →

Films from the Rikki collection: me as subject, the lens turned on the act of self. Hover a card to play; click to open it in the gallery.

Selected work

A manager working with a tablet in an open office — Manager Experience
Amazon · Sr. UX Designer & AI Design Leader
Manager Experience

Internal tools that help Amazon's managers lead with clarity: performance, development, and team health unified in one place. Owned the IA and interaction model from research through ship; partnered with engineering, product, and HR research across multiple orgs.

A customer paying at Whole Foods checkout — Fresh & Whole Foods
Amazon · UX Manager
Fresh & Whole Foods

Leading design for how people discover, choose, and receive fresh food online, bridging the gap between screen and shelf. Managed designers, researchers, and writers across discovery, list-building, and post-purchase flows; reusable patterns adopted across the grocery surface.

Watching Prime Video on the couch — Marvelous Mrs. Maisel home screen
Amazon · Sr. UX Designer
Prime Video

Shaping the streaming experience for hundreds of millions: navigation, discovery, and surfacing the right story at the right moment, where algorithm meets editorial intuition. Contributed to title-detail, channel browsing, and recommendation surfaces.

Amazon · UX Designer
Explore

Virtual experiences and interactive discovery: designing the interface between physical presence and digital connection. How do you make someone feel like they're somewhere they've never been? Took it from concept through public launch.

Exploring Consciousness — working with AI from a quiet desk overlooking a city
Conscious UX · Founder & sole designer
Exploring Consciousness

A year-long personal exploration: seventeen thousand short films generated with Sora, organized into three threads. I designed it end-to-end: prompt language, curation system, the streaming UI you're looking at right now. Where AI-as-medium becomes a real design discipline.

Conscious UX — Leading Human-Centered Design in the Age of AI, by Rikki Teeters
Conscious UX · Author & researcher
Conscious UX — the book

The methodology underneath everything else in the studio. Wrote Conscious UX: Leading Human-Centered Design in the Age of AI from a year of interviews with 130 designers, researchers, and educators worldwide. 120 of them chose to share their names publicly. Three pillars, nine principles, one practice. The book is the spine; the films, the lab, and the writing are where it lives. More on the book →

I read every message myself.

I'm open to conversations about AI experience design, design leadership, speaking, and selective consulting.

For something quicker, talk to Rikki.AI →