Approach

My 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.

The work

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

Research

• Generative research: Conducting interviews, contextual inquiry, participatory design community workshops, co-designing with users to shape product and service direction in healthcare, civic tech, and enterprise contexts.
• Evaluative research: Conducting usability testing of prototypes, heuristic evaluations, and other methods to validate hypotheses and solutions, clarify pains and gains/opportunities, and shape product roadmap.
• Systems mapping: Creating service blueprints, mental models/persona documentation, and opportunity frameworks that align cross?functional teams and inform prioritization
• ResearchOps and DesignOps: Creating playbooks as part of business development efforts informing and evangelizing the work

Product management

• Innovation and Strategy: 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