How I think,
design, and work.

I didn’t fall into design. I didn’t get bored of engineering at 25 and pivot. I knew at 15 and never looked back. A career-counseling workshop, one line on a board — Interest + Talent = Career — and it hit me like a light bulb. A decade of art classes plus the kid who was bizarrely good with computers. Art + computers = design. That was it.

By 21 I had two bachelor’s degrees, four years of experience, a grade-4 violin diploma, and a husband. I didn’t find design — I grew up with it. It became the backbone of who I am, and maybe that’s why I’ve survived legacy systems, 40-year-old products, engineer-led teams, ML workflows, startups, motherhood, and layoffs. There’s real power in that kind of clarity. It becomes part of your spine.

I’m a Senior Product Designer by title, but the real work is obsessing over how humans experience things. I’m a user-experience specialist who happens to carry a product-design title. Thirteen-plus years in, started at 16 — at this point UX is instinct, not process. I feel when something’s wrong before I can name it.

I don’t just design — I build. Feel the problem → design the solution → ship the code. I prototype in real code because the biggest risk usually isn’t the visuals, it’s the logic. B2B enterprise is my home: data-heavy, technical, the kind of product most designers find intimidating or boring. That’s exactly where I do my best work.

My AI-era stance: in a world of AI, human experience matters more, not less — because AI is built for humans. The more powerful the technology, the more the experience layer matters. AI didn’t replace my judgment; it removed my one bottleneck — the raw hours of hand-coding between an idea and shipped reality. The judgment was always mine; now it moves at the speed of my thinking.

When you look at a chair, the only thing that comes to mind is to sit on it.

That’s it. The design is so good you don’t think about the design — you just do the thing. No instructions, no onboarding, no tutorial. You look, you sit.

Everything in the world is either designed so well you don’t notice it (you just use it) or so badly you can’t stop noticing (frustration). A door handle, a water bottle, an enterprise BI tool — I judge them all the same way: is it as obvious as knowing to sit in a chair? The whole point of making anything is to reach that obviousness. You get there by obsessing over how humans experience things. That’s the job.

The chair test, turned into five laws you can name in a review (“that fails law 3”). Bake them into the primitives so obviousness is structural and inherited for free — never re-applied screen by screen.

1. 01Prominence = importanceThe thing that matters most is unmistakably the biggest. Never make the user hunt for the headline.
2. 02State before wordsOn-track / off-track, gain / loss, asset / debt is readable by color + sign + weight before you read the label.
3. 03Fact ≠ forecastA current balance looks settled and exact; a projection looks uncertain (range, lighter). A forecast must never masquerade as a fact.
4. 04Actionable looks actionableTappable, editable, "ask" elements invite the action; static info stays quiet.
5. 05One element, one jobNo Swiss-army cards.

When I look at my work — professional and personal — it’s all the same kind of thing: adaptive systems that learn the user and help them decide or improve. A scheduling engine made legible. An ML platform nobody could use, turned into one they relied on. A natural-language layer over data so people could just ask. And on my own time: a forecasting engine for my finances, an authorization system for AI agents, a writing coach that learns my style, a cooking companion that learns how I cook.

I didn’t plan that pattern — it’s how my brain works. I can’t build the boring version of anything. The moment I touch a problem I’m asking “how could this learn? how could this adapt? how could this make the person better at the thing?” An archive for my articles became an AI writing coach because I literally can’t help it.

Software should learn you and extend your thinking.

I run toward the hard problem nobody wants to touch — the 40-year-old black box with no documentation, the powerful system nobody can actually use, the mess everyone’s avoiding. I get genuinely obsessed. The less I can find, the more I want to find. I’ll build the architecture from scratch, sit in support calls, ask hundreds of questions, befriend the one engineer who remembers how it works — until I understand it better than almost anyone who didn’t write the code. You can’t rebuild something beautifully until you understand the mess.

And I’m a utility person, not an entertainment person. I build things people need, not things that just engage them. Productivity over novelty. If it doesn’t solve a real problem in someone’s actual life, I’m not interested. I only build what’s missing — never what already exists.

I’ve loved the northern lights for as long as I can remember, and I try to get waves into my work somehow. My love for the ocean and dark, dim lighting is just who I am.

Northern lights (aurora)

Curtains of light that ripple — horizontal bands that drift and breathe. Subtle, alive, ethereal.

Ocean waves

The movement pattern everywhere — slow, organic, continuous. Never abrupt.

Dark, dim lighting

Not "dark mode for looks." Genuinely preferred — ocean at night, lit from below, barely there.

Teal accent

The color of deep ocean + aurora. It is the system, not decoration.

Intensity is “whispering intensity” — the screen is alive, but barely; you’re not sure if it’s moving. The user is floating on a boat: the fixed aurora is the ocean, and content drifts into view, holds steady so you can read it, then drifts away. Serene, continuous, breathing — never snappy or jarring.

Simple, straightforward, direct, confident — never boastful. Lead with outcomes and specifics. Let whitespace do the work. My raw voice, not AI filler.

• Complexity isn’t the enemy. Illegible complexity is. The job is clarity, not removal.
• The best products come from solving a real problem you actually have — not from guessing at a market.
• Don’t build what already exists. Build what’s missing.
• Design that engineering can’t build isn’t good design. Feasibility is part of the craft.
• A small, surgical fix that cuts real cognitive load is worth as much as a big redesign.
• You earn the right to a strong opinion by understanding the system better than anyone expected you to.
• Never a loose end. Every path must resolve into a conclusive, satisfying, actionable next step — never a dangling question with no way forward.

I always have a plan — and I’m always willing to adjust it when life throws a curveball. Clear about the goal, flexible about the path. I don’t white-knuckle one plan and break when reality interferes; I hold the destination firm and let the route flex.

A career across two countries, legacy systems, restructurings, building a life from very little — clarity plus adaptability. It’s the most durable way I know to operate.

• 01Plan before execute — present a plan and get approval before writing code. No surprises.
• 02Teach as you go — narrate the why, surface tradeoffs, explain in plain language. No jargon dumps.
• 03Talk in prose, not menus — I reframe questions; multiple-choice flattens that.
• 04Real data, no assumptions — sourced numbers, never invented; model as a band with a floor and ceiling.
• 05UX substance > visual polish — judge a change by whether it helps the user decide and act.
• 06Rewrite over patch — if a file gets messy, do a clean rewrite.
• 07Document everything — so the history persists.

Professional (13+ years): Led the UX modernization of over half of WebFOCUS, a ~50-year-old enterprise analytics platform — including the ~40-year-old scheduling engine (ReportCaster), the ML workflows, and the natural-language query layer. Took systems customers couldn’t use and made them ones they relied on. WebFOCUS was named a Customer Experience Leader in Dresner’s 2025 awards during that period.

On my own: five live, working AI products — all built for myself, to solve my own problems. All proof of the same philosophy: adaptive systems that learn the user, made obvious, built because I needed them.