My Story

Way back in 2015, my first job in the tech industry was at a web-crawling startup in San Francisco.

Semantics3 (the company) crawled the internet for retail product information, and sold it in various forms to other companies.

For example, if you want to know how much a red iPhone 4S would cost at Mohamed Mustafa's Bazar in March 2014 in Singapore, Semantics3 would know that.

My job was to take spreadsheets of product information from our customers, write a program to feed it through our API, run that program, and give them back a bigger spreadsheet, with better product information.

I worked for clients in big businesses (e.g., Walmart) and small startups all over the world.

Being a startup, Semantics3 was really trying to figure out how to make money off of its enormous product database. They had perhaps a dozen products based on this database.

This meant that when customers showed up at our landing page, they didn't know what they were looking at. They thought we had one product that did everything, for one type of customer.

But we actually had lots of products, for many different types of customers, that mostly did exactly what those customers wanted.

The sales team knew this since they talked to customers all the time. And since I trained as a front-end developer, building a new landing page was right up my street!

So we (the sales team and I) mapped out the current products and solutions, made some mockups, got some feedback and tried things out.

Over and over again. Until... I'd built a new marketing site!

And it worked! Inbound leads to the sales team went up ~27%!

And when prospective customers phoned up, they knew what they wanted! Customers were happier, sales people were happier, I was happier.

Net happiness was increased. Life goal: accomplished.

Little did I know I'd just had my first forray into UX. We'd researched the problem by talking to customers and empathised with them.

I'd designed an experience for them, a series of interactions, iterated on it, and eventually built it.

I'd found my calling. My mind was blown.

My next job was at JP Morgan Chase, as a front-end developer. I worked on the Profile section of Chase.com, which gets visited by about three million people every month.

It was pretty cool that my work reached so many people. If you have an account with Chase, you've seen my pixels. If it worked well for you, you're welcome! And if not, I'm sorry :(

At Chase I was exposed to entirely new aspects of both engineering and design.

For example, at Chase, accessibility is really important.

Chase.com has to work reliably on basically all devices, at all screen sizes, for young people, and old people, and people of all stripes with visual, motor or hearing impairments. And this is not negotiable. We took staying tightly in compliance with WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) pretty seriously.

Honestly, I really enjoyed it! I like spending time empathising with people, and even took it upon myself to be my team's Accessibility Champion!

But really, I wanted to move into design. And from the outside, that's a scary prospect.

Design, to me, was a big mystical black box and I didn't want to just start calling myself a designer because I like drawing things, and see what happens.

So on the side, I started working towards it.

I started taking online courses, and learning the tools of the trade.

DesignLab, specifically, was a pretty eye-opening experience. I worked on a series of projects, learning about typography, page hierarchy, prototyping, wireframing, and high-fidelity mockups.

Most importantly, I was assigned a mentor, with whom I'd speak every week. I gradually got a sense of what I was doing, and started practicing on side projects.

I also started reading books, some of which (pictured) I found particularly shaped my thinking.

And I started learning the tools of the trade. I became pretty savvy with Sketch, Illustrator and Photoshop, and started doing a Daily UI challenge.

But despite all this, I was lacking structure. It seemed to me that there were designers, and UX designers. I was getting a sense that UX is a craft, and I didn't know what mastery even smelled like, let alone how to aim for it.

Enter Pivotal Labs. My husband's company was doing an engagement with Pivotal at the time, and he'd frequently come home waxing lyrical about how Pivotal takes the UX design process fanatically seriously.

His team was working with Aaron Lawrence, UX Ninja™. And Aaron kindly volunteered to sit me down and drop some knowledge.

Pivotal sees designers falling into three buckets: research, interaction design and visual design. Mastery, to them, means being good at all three. And Aaron's advice, to a padawan like me, was to pick one or two and practice.

So practice I did! The best strategy I came up with was to start mediating the dev-design gap.

For those who don't know, this is where I've found communication usually breaks down between developers and designers, because developers are trained to think about CSS frameworks, Angular/React patterns, streaming performance and the latest ES6 fetish whereas designers are thinking about their audience, kerning, whitespace and colourblind-friendly palettes.

Inevitably, both sides make assumptions about how the other side works and sadness ensues.

And this is where I fit in!

I kept one foot in the design team, and one in the development team. I worked with the amazing design team at Chase on a complete overhaul of the profile section.

Frankly, I found that making the effort to be communicative and organised is easiest way to bring joy to a project for everyone, not just the manager.

At this point I was craving a little variety. We moved to Sydney (Australia) where I joined an agile consultancy, PALO IT, and worked on a variety of things for a whole bunch of clients, both startups and high-profile financial behemoths.

This was awesome! I prototyped flows for Westpac, Australia's second-largest bank to help them market personal loans to GenZ. I helped MunichRe (one of the world's biggest reinsurers) automate their process for quoting and selling cyber insurance. And I got to work with a bunch of fledgling startups, designing beautiful interfaces to help with everything from mental health, through to maternity education and audioguides for South Asia.

In the shakeup of 2020/2021 my husband got an job offer we couldn't refuse, but meant we'd be flying around the world again. We packed up our things and I embraced #digital-nomad-life moving back to California. I spent about six months freelancing, working on everything from car-parts retail to ethical clothing e-commerce sites, but craving a stable team to work with, joined Farmers Business Network (FBN), an Agriculture startup.

Life at FBN was pretty great. Over two years I did all kinds of things, like launching a loan calculator to increase loan application completion rates, and also launched AcreVision (Zillow for farmland).

Everything changed however, when in October 2023, I welcomed my son into the world. As my due date approached I tidied up my loose ends, ramped my colleagues up on my projects, and left FBN to spend the next eight months mothering my precious little lunatic.

As a user-centric designer at heart, statistically, this has been going great. His weight is up 300%, growing at 11% month over month, his height puts him squarely in the 70th percentile, and like any overly-excited startup, he adds new features every day of questionable value (most recently, chewing on the carpet). But as he becomes more self sufficient, I find myself missing my design life more and more.

So, as the first step of a gradual transition, I'm returning to the world of freelance work. If you’re looking for a freelance designer with experience in agriculture, finance, e-commerce, retail, insurance, storytelling, ethical clothing, mental health, maternity education, audio guides, SaaS apps, API products, educational games (and more!) with expertise in design systems, qualitative user research, interaction design, accessibility, wire framing, workshopping, illustration, somewhat-rusty web development (and even more!), download my resumé and reach out. I'd love to help 🙂.