Sarah Phares is an independent UX consultant who helps teams align on opportunities, identify meaningful insights, develop differentiated experiences, and evolve process through steady leadership and purposeful design.

Whether leading a team, a workstream within a team, or a work session, Sarah clearly defines the problem, develops activities that yield insights, and fosters inspired ideation. She’s equally comfortable guiding strategic vision work as she is leading research and content design efforts to launch new products and services and evolve existing ones.

Her UX career spans 15 years and includes experience at the innovation consultancies frog and Smart Design, where she helped clients ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies leverage user insights to define new strategies and experiences, as well as in-house leadership at Verizon Design, where she led multi-disciplinary product design teams and organizational initiatives to help shape culture and process. Prior to working in UX, Sarah worked as graphic designer, and incorporates her knowledge of branding, visual communications, and environmental graphic design into her UX approach.

Sarah holds a Master of Design in Interaction Design from Carnegie Mellon University and two undergraduate degrees from Washington University in St. Louis, a BFA in Visual Communications and a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture. She has university-level teaching experience in design and writing.

Born in New Orleans, Sarah’s career path took her to Boston, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh before 10 years in New York. After a year of cross-country living, Sarah now lives in Washington, D.C.