Del Sol

Lead UX Designer · San Diego

Roy Thronson

12+ years in UX, inside 20+ years designing and building digital products.

AI-assisted UX, in practice. Rapid prototyping with Claude and Figma Agents — on a governed design system, with a human owning every decision.

See the work Roy’s resume

What I do

Three things, and they feed each other. Research finds the opportunity, prototyping proves it, and strategy makes the practice repeatable.

01

Design systems & prototyping

Interactive prototypes that behave like the product, built against a governed component library. Figma and Figma Agents today, Axure RP where a team still runs on it. Testable before engineering writes a line, and accessible to WCAG 2.1 AA from the component up.

See the case studies

02

Research & opportunity

Competitive and gap analysis against what the market already offers, heuristic review of what exists today, and an inventory of what users need measured against what they already have. That is where the real opportunities surface. From there I use AI assistance to rapidly produce personas, journey maps and wireframe concepts.

See the case studies

03

UX strategy & practice

Adopting the right tool at the right point in the UX journey. I evaluate what a stage of the work actually needs and bring in the tooling that fits it. The goal is not novelty. It is keeping the team competitive and producing effective, intuitive applications at a rate the business can fund.

Read the strategy
Roy Thronson standing in a creek bed in a red rock canyon

About Roy

I translate complex business requirements into interfaces people can actually use. My career spans enterprise application design, responsive websites and front-end development across healthcare, financial technology and other industries — and I prototype at a fidelity you can test against, not just click through.

Since 2015 I have led UX at a San Diego pharmacy benefit manager, expanding design’s footprint across multiple business units by redefining how UX is engaged, leveraged and delivered. In 2025 I began championing a UXAI engagement model: established UX practice combined with practical AI tools to accelerate research, ideation and prototyping, while designers and stakeholders keep ownership of the decisions and the quality.

  • Enterprise UX
  • Design systems
  • Figma & Figma Agents
  • Claude
  • Axure RP
  • Usability testing
  • WCAG 2.1 AA
  • Section 508

Selected work

Seven case studies, two live prototypes you can click through, and three walkthrough videos. Everything here is something I can talk through line by line.

How I work with teams

Most of my work has been inside organisations where UX arrived late and had to earn its place.

Growing UX

I build the case for design involvement earlier in the cycle, then make it stick — through process, through governance, and through showing results leadership can see. The three-year UXAI adoption strategy is the most recent version of that.

Agile UX

Working as a designer inside an Agile development team is genuinely awkward, and Lean UX is not always the answer people hope it is. Research and structure running far enough ahead of the sprint to be useful, prototypes testable before engineering commits, and a clear rule for which work takes the fast path.

Leading UX

I built a UX team from one designer to four across three business units, and the part I valued most was the mentoring. I would rather leave a team more capable than leave them a folder of files.

Capabilities

UX certified professional

  • UX leadership & strategy
  • Design system ownership & governance
  • AI-assisted design — Figma Agents, Claude
  • High-fidelity interactive prototyping
  • Contextual inquiry & usability testing
  • Journey mapping & persona development
  • Agile UX & cross-team collaboration
  • Success metrics driven

Web & mobile specialties

  • Mobile-first, responsive design
  • 20+ years HTML / CSS / JavaScript
  • SEO-optimized, semantic HTML5 interface design
  • Hand-coded custom websites
  • React-ready front-end prototypes
  • Software application design
  • Accessible design to WCAG 2.1 AA, and Section 508 where it applies

Credentials

2026

AI for UX Design

Designlab · four weeks of coursework on AI tools and workflows for UX.

Verify certificate

2019

Certificate in User Experience

UC San Diego Extension · foundational UX research, design and evaluation.

View certificate

2026

Resume

Employers, experience, tools and selected projects.

View resume

Yes, I built this

No page builder. No template with a name like Ultimate Portfolio Pro. No plugin quietly loading four hundred kilobytes of JavaScript to fade in a heading.

This page is hand-written HTML and one stylesheet. The layout is CSS Grid, the palette is sampled from the sun in my logo and my own photograph of Monument Valley, and the type is Fraunces over Inter — because a designer’s portfolio probably should not look like a developer’s default.

A few things you can check without taking my word for it:

  • View the source. Semantic markup throughout — header, nav, main, section, article, footer. Headings run in order. Every image has alt text that describes the image rather than naming the file.
  • Tab through it. Visible focus rings on everything interactive, a skip link as the first stop, and nothing important hidden behind a hover.
  • Shrink the window. It reflows from 1400 pixels down to 320 without a horizontal scrollbar, and the type scales with the viewport rather than jumping at breakpoints.
  • Check the contrast. Everything meets WCAG 2.1 AA. The gold is darker than you might expect for precisely that reason.
  • Read the head. Person schema in JSON-LD, so a crawler knows who I am, where I work and what I am certified in.

I mention all of this because a portfolio is a work sample whether you intend it to be or not. If the page is going to claim semantic HTML, accessibility and front-end ability, the page may as well be the evidence.

If you are reading this in DevTools — hello. I hope the nesting is tidy.

  • 0frameworks, bundlers or build steps
  • 1stylesheet, written by hand
  • AAWCAG 2.1, verified not assumed
  • 320pxnarrowest supported viewport