Design Principles

I believe design is about creating healing, connection and joy.  I work with organizations and communities to remove barriers that prevent people from thriving by designing better products using research, UX and service design. Design can help make sense of the world by using research and empathy to drive hypothesis-driven products. We use co-creation and collaborative methods to create empathetic systems of care that can be measured, evaluated, and scaled to create healing, connection, and social change. This design philosophy translates into design principles central to my work:

• Create impact: work with a team that helps make a measurable impact using hypothesis-driven work to make a change in someone’s life. Many people need help, and our work can allow people access to products and services that end someone’s pain and create an impact. All our work must strive for that. I also believe in the impact of mentoring others and work to help ensure those starting out in their career as designers get the support they need to be successful.
• Elevate the voices for truly inclusive design: I center the lived experiences of those who are forgotten and excluded from a system. These are the people who should be central to the things we build. We often reduce those experiences to ‘do accessibility testing in the next release’ but with more people identifying as having disabilities we need to do more to embed inclusive design into our work.
• Push to be Future Forward: The world is in a period of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. I focus on the tactical ways to create value and understand how work can scale for the future to create resilience and support both people and systems.
• Use data and create hypothesis-driven design: Hypotheses help us identify patterns and outliers but also help us iterate on our work. Not every screen requires a hypothesis, but metrics ensure we know if we’ve achieved success. And I believe at my heart that Agile development is the best way to do this.
• Celebrate humane leadership: Leadership is about nurturing, inspiring, supporting, building pathways for growth, and celebrating teams. I advocate for inclusivity, better working methods (DesignOps and ResearchOps), and more humane workplaces. As a neurodiverse individual, my role and passion are to create servant leadership that brings out the best in all of us by starting with the heart and the head.

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Process

These are some of the best practices I use in my work.

Research:

• Discovery:
  • Identifying areas of research, research questions, and hypotheses
  • Conducting generative research to understand people using multiple methods (qualitative via workshops, interviews, focus groups, etc., and quantitative data, with market research as necessary) 
  • Planning and facilitating workshops, including service design (service blueprints, etc.) and co-designing with community members via equity-centered design to understand processes, pains, and gains/opportunities 
  • Translating research into insights and research findings and creating recommendations on features and the next steps
  • Conducting ad hoc research requests for people
• Delivery:
  • Evangelizing: sharing point of view on research and design best practices in various mediums (marketing materials, presentations, etc.), including planning, building, maintaining, and evangelizing ResearchOps and ethical research
  • Testing: Ensuring product addresses pains/gains through evaluative research to validate hypotheses and answer questions

Product management:

• Innovation: Identifying ideas for features and improvements for new (0-1) and existing products, translating these into requirements, and prioritising via frameworks, identifying success criteria
• Delivery: Managing product roadmap and backlog to deliver a vision, including reprioritizing features and user stories tied to new data about research findings, etc. and writing user stories, ensure they are INVESTed

Design:

• Design: Designing a product using UI design (including on information architecture, interaction design, information design and content strategy) in a variety of fidelities (wireframes, prototypes etc.) working within design systems and outside of them
• Design systems: Planning, building, maintaining and evangelizing DesignOps
• Evangelizing:  Defining a point of view on best practices using a variety of mediums (marketing materials, presentations, etc.) on ethical tech, Inclusive design and accessibility, participatory design, trauma-informed design and neurodiversity, and innovations in design, research and product management including AI

Leadership:

• People management:
  • Hiring staff, including reviewing materials, conducting interviews, evaluating candidates and providing recommendations on hiring
  • Mentoring junior designers through education and partnering on goals 
• Delivery:
  • Creating proposals and pitches, statements of work, project plans, and other documentation, and participating in sales presentations
  • Identifying, monitoring, managing risk, and evaluating impact
  • Teaching and evangelizing research, design, and product management, including creating and delivering materials