ABOUT
I got here by a longer route than most
I spent my early twenties figuring out what I actually wanted to do. After college I moved to Chicago, worked retail management, then landed in a warehouse job I didn't particularly like. But somewhere in that warehouse job I started fixing things nobody asked me to fix, reorganizing systems, labeling shelves, and trying to make sense of software that made simple tasks harder than they needed to be. I realized I liked that part more than anything else I'd done. That eventually led me to spending time learning to code, then to UX design, and eventually to five years building enterprise software at Alight Solutions. The route was longer than most, but I think it shaped the way I work in ways a more direct path wouldn't have.
DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
What I actually believe about design
I get a little skeptical when design conversations stay at the surface, when the work is mostly about how something looks rather than whether it helps anyone do anything. The problems I find most interesting are the ones where a simple-looking interaction has a lot of complexity underneath, and where the real challenge is giving someone enough confidence to act without needing to fully understand the system behind it.
I care about constraints, about handoff quality, about whether something can actually be built the way it was designed. That comes partly from having spent time learning to code before I found design. It gave me a way of thinking about both sides of the problem at once, even if my role sits firmly on the design side.
HOW I WORK
How I tend to show up
Quiet, mostly. I'm not the loudest person in a design review but I come to it having thought through all the edge cases before the meeting. When I bring something up, a concern about a direction, a discrepancy with the design system, a question about feasibility, I try to make it worth saying.
I work closely with developers and I've put real effort into understanding how things get built, not because I'm trying to do their job but because it makes me better at mine. I've found that designers who understand the development side of the work tend to make better decisions and facilitate easier handoffs, which is just as important as the screens themselves.
WHAT I WORK ON
The kinds of problems I gravitate toward
01
Self-service platforms
Tools that give people control over complex tasks without requiring deep system knowledge. Most of my career has lived here.
02
Workflow and configuration design
Breaking down multi-step, rules-based processes into clear, understandable interactions without watering down the functionality underneath.
03
Design systems and shared patterns
Creating reusable components that improve consistency and reduce design debt, including the research, documentation, and developer alignment that makes them actually get adopted.
04
Prototyping
I enjoy prototyping more than most designers I've worked with. Getting something close enough to a real experience that users forget they're not on a live product is genuinely satisfying to me.
OUTSIDE OF WORK
The rest of it
I spend most of my time with my family. I cook a lot and it's one of the things I genuinely look forward to. I've been slowly putting together a cookbook of recipes I want to pass down, not something to publish, just something to keep.
I enjoy traveling and experiencing places and perspectives that are different from my own, even if I don't get to do it as often as I'd like.
PAST PROJECTS