DESIGN

Great results can be luck. So, my design depends on a great process to get me there.

For a deeper dive into case-studies, check out the projects page.

Define the world: the 'set of conditions for the possibility of success.'

Start with a problem or opportunity and brainstorm how to work within it asking UX's 'How might we...?' This is a phase where a lot is literally put on the wall to find what sticks.

For Long Time, Let's See, my team fixated on assisting with impersonal addiction in social media. That took dozens of possible forms from plugins to events to our end-result, a standalone app inspired by dating apps to get people off the app. That wasn't an idle decision- we prototyped and tested rapidly to see if the empathetic and subconscious effects we expected from each solution were actually happening.

Produce as low fidelity of a prototype or wireframe as provides the key experience.

VR can be cardboard. Intense data analytics can be vibe-coded with mock data and 'lorem ipsum.' An experience that requires robust UI/UX from the first moment makes too many assumptions, and any reaction is just smoke and mirrors. I don't polish yet: I try to perfect what's at the core of the result.

Want Cake, Am Lazy was a simple game. Inspired by Please, Don't Touch Anything, and the reality of forging a Rube-Goldberg like excuse to not stand up from a comfortable chair, users had to feel a grounded sense of explorative humor. My final 3D prototype worked, but better for testing was a simple cardboard mockup. Testers could point, and I could move interactive elements of the model without speaking to serve as an adaptive AI. I found solutions alongside users that I individually couldn't have generated, staying true to the idea's commitment to human ingenuity.

Listen to what users said. More importantly, what they did.

User testing results in strong opinions and ideas. Those are great! But, the better insights are in subconscious responses: where users said they'd do something and never did. I iterate to make my designs natural, so those disconnects don't happen.

Color Guard, my iOS game, needed to reward the tension between long-term strategy, like traditional tower defense, and short-term tactics inspired by abstract art and mobile use tendencies. Users said they loved short-term gameplay early on, but analytics showed that they optimized away the fun when it became possible to fully upgrade only one guard for a longer term strategy later on. So, I added a late game enemy that targets your highest-upgraded guard, adding the tension that users loved back just when it seemed like it might fade. I also made Game-Feel decisions making explosions of higher-upgraded guards feel awesome, so the core mechanic of the experience was the most fun part.

Beautify what should now be a unit of experiential vocabulary.

The experience should work now, even in black-and-white or cardboard. The thing is not the graphics or the flashy bits, it's the effect it has on the user.

Pac-Man is just a circle until you give him a name. Similarly, at InsideRisk we learned that people were engaging with our AI-conversations in the direction that we wanted, but not necessarily in the magnitude. Our experiences depended on revealing how people act in high-pressure situations, not just how they are in ordinary circumstances. Video editing like flashing lights to make a street corner feel real, or audio that gently provokes emotional responses are crucial here. A finished experience becomes cognitively powerful through sensory details. For confidentiality reasons, shown to the left is a contrast between early Figma designs and a higher-fidelity prototype of a travel app I designed alongside a team.

This process drives everything I make.

Check out my projects page, or read about my philosophy and goals or my performances.