Klara Schmitt

About Me

Hello! I am a Principal Product Designer and Accessibility Specialist at Esri. For 10 years, I worked on ArcGIS Hub, a content-management-system that helped organizations connect with their communities to make more informed data-driven decisions. In 2025, I transferred to the Centralized Accessibility Team to focus on some of the unique challenges of scaling accessibility across a suite of data visualization tools. I excel at finding new ways to present complex technical information to a diverse, non-technical audience.

Experience

I believe in user-centered design and have years of experience with agile on both stream and cross-functional scrum teams collaborating with product managers and developers to take problems from ideation through execution. As a designer, my day-to-day activities included research, wireframing, prototyping in Figma, usability testing, and quality assurance testing, with some touch-up HTML/CSS as needed.

As an Accessibility Engineer, I research, plan, and collaborate on system design patterns for integrating accessibility workflows across products. I consult with product development teams and customers on solutions to best meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and I write a lot of accessibility documentation.

If you’ve found my portfolio, but don’t have the password required to access certain sections, please feel free to reach out to me on any channel, such as LinkedIn, to request it.

Looking towards the future

It is no big surprise that AI is rewriting the career trajectories of those software design. Roles are collapsing in on one another and my personal perspective is that it appears prudent to know a combination of Product Management, Product Design, and Product Development.

An my heart, I consider myself a designer, but I’ve always been data driven and motivated to learn. While on Hub, I firmly believed in doing whatever it took to row the boat forward, regardless of whether those skills were part of my official job duties or not. I want to help people. My colleagues. Our customers. And if that meant teaching myself how to write telemetry specs to track the success of our features or writing acceptance criteria to get features into the development cue faster…then I’d do it. Because I truly want people to succeed.

I’m not sure of the precise title I see myself having in the future. I’d like to continue to be creative, to push the boundaries on what is possible between technology, accessibility, and artificial intelligence, but to do so in a human-centered way. I believe in equal access, in data privacy, in personal autonomy, and living in a world where people still feel valued for the contributions they bring to the table.

Free Time

When I’m not working, I spend my time hiking, writing, and trying to build the word processing software I wish I had for the self-publishing process of writing a series of books. While I live in an area that is plentiful in both humidity and mosquitos during the summer months, my little slice of peace is tracking the wildlife that runs through my backyard. I have seen raccoons, skunks, possums, deer, coyotes, birds, rabbits, squirrels, and even a field mouse eating my raspberries. But my favorite are the foxes. In spring 2024, I had a family of red foxes living under my deck and now whenever I see any of the fox kin running around the neighborhood, I always think of them as “my fox kids.”

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