I am honored to say that I worked with Taylor Hayward at Aquent, where he was our Senior Product Designer, and he’s one of the most thoughtful, strategic collaborators I’ve ever worked with. Taylor brings deep design expertise, a sharp business sense, and a genuine curiosity that drives smart, user-centered solutions.

From day one, Taylor was able to jump right in with the product team, engineers, leadership, and users who were deeply set in old workflows and hesitant to change. Through clear, intuitive, and well-organized design work, he helped shift user behavior in meaningful ways. His improvements didn’t just make the product better—they changed how people worked, making tasks faster, easier, and more efficient across the board.

As a Product Manager, I leaned on Taylor regularly for guidance to ensure we were building the right experiences. Taylor is absolutely the guy you go to for advice! He’s decisive, collaborative, and always brings thoughtful rationale to whatever he does. Taylor would be an amazing addition to any team!

Lola Brautigan
Senior Product Manager
Worked with Taylor on the same team at Aquent · July 2025

As a small company, I became Taylor’s manager almost by accident. It was a fortunate accident because Taylor’s one of the hardest workers I’ve been around. He is an experienced UX researcher and designer and I learned a heck of a lot from Taylor. Having no UX experience myself, Taylor could have shunned me altogether. Instead, he went the other way and coached me up on design principles. This wasn’t an anomaly. Taylor enjoys helping people across the organization. I was able to help connect the dots between Product and Design with Taylor’s help and we became quite a team.

Over time, we built out a larger Design team and Taylor was instrumental in crafting the foundation for our team. In addition to building out designs for the majority of our product roadmap goals, Taylor helped in the selection of a design system, formalized usability studies, implemented peer UX reviews plus dozens of other items I’m probably forgetting.

Taylor is a great designer, but doesn’t work in a silo. He has extensive business savvy and can connect the larger financial goals of the business back to what we research and design.

Lastly, Taylor helped build the culture. His gregarious personality and willingness to learn, educate and help was a major influence on our culture as it formed in the early days of our company. Thank you, Taylor!

John Zilch, Jr.
Exploring the Intersection of Tech and Business
Managed Taylor directly · December 2019

Taylor is a very creative technologist. You can expect his development of high quality user interfaces to always be extremely well done and thoughtful. Users can expect a rich and pleasing experience when using web applications that Taylor has developed. I would not hesitate to recommend Taylor for any position in this technology space.

Brian Glover
Project Manager, Solutions and Automation
Worked with Taylor on a different team · November 2014