OVERVIEW
Talks on usability, mental models, and designing products people can actually use, for product, design, and engineering teams.
YEAR
2019
DELIVERABLES
Photography Branding
TED-STYLE TALK
It’s Not User Error
A talk for 300+ people at an internal, company-wide TED-style series. The argument: when people struggle with a product, it’s usually a design failure, not a user failure. I built it around three takeaways:
What’s obvious to us isn’t obvious to users
Design for the moment people are actually in
Make the right action the easiest one
Each came with a real-world example, like the 2018 Hawaii false missile alert, plus a redesign showing how small changes to layout, labels, and flow could have prevented it.
DESIGN SERIES
Designing for the Novice User
A talk for a company design series on how first-time users make sense of a product. Everyone brings a mental model, an internal picture of how something should work, and confusion happens when the product doesn’t match it.
I used examples from Instagram and Netflix to show how familiar patterns set expectations.
Takeaways
Lean on patterns people already know
Reveal complexity gradually, not all at once
Test with people who’ve never seen the product
Other projects
