Based in Honolulu, Hawaii
My career started in grad school. At Indiana University I learned how to understand theory and develop concepts that make experiences useful, usable and exciting.
From Kohl's to Nationwide and now Possible I've led design for some of the most important products at each company. I've delivered small projects with impossibly quick turnarounds and huge projects with hundreds of stakeholders.
At Possible I led our effort to make credit accessible for everyone. Working at a startup means wearing multiple hats, at Possible I was able to design the physical card and mailer, write design requirements and have a voice in our company vision.
Start with a vision that guides the project to some greater purpose. It's not a contract but a direction that the team, and the stakeholders, can get behind.
After prioritizing and delivering some of the efforts, we can be critical about the vision. What works and what doesn't? More importantly, why?
Building a North Star vision doesn't mean pausing work. It's about consistently moving and discovering the path forward with stakeholders and customers.
Possible Finance ● 2022 ● Senior Product Designer
My journey at Possible started in April of 2021 and by August I was leading the company’s next flagship product. We launched a pilot during the summer of 2022, and we started scaling up to bring the card to our entire 350,000 customer waitlist.
Overall, the results were great. We made generally good assumptions and kept the experience from getting too bloated too quickly. Early problems were easy to identify.
Overall, the results were great. We made generally good assumptions and kept the experience from getting too bloated too quickly. Early problems were easy to identify.
Possible Finance is a Series-C fintech startup They’re on a mission to make finance fair for underserved communities. This was the next step for a lot of people, a revolving account to build credit and a chance to open new opportunities.
The experience we launched with was barebones. It also included a lot of assumptions. Customers could apply for the card. Of course. They could set up their account, use a central dashboard, see their card information, activate their physical card and, most importantly, pay their credit card bill.
We still had some opportunities and places to improve the experience further, but we launched an MVP and made some big improvements with very little time.
Kohl's ● 2021 ● Senior Product Designer
For two years we tore down and rebuilt the foundation of what every Kohl's customer would see and, hopefully, few would notice. I created a modular e-commerce experience for one of the largest retailers in America. The work we did is core to the future of Kohl's and a great story of a cross-functional team dedicated to the customer.
The last update to Kohl's Cart and Checkout was made in 2014 in a waterfall process, with plenty of compromise. In 5 years features were bolted on, often with bespoke solutions for mobile, tablet, desktop and kiosk.
Customers expectations have changed since then, the gamification of sales and discounts is seen as a painfully opaque process. Often a customer will tell us they just want to know what they're paying. E-commerce was no longer a novel idea in 2020.
Customers know what a transaction should look like and the overwhelming options that Kohl's offers only add to the cognitive load, pushing sales away from the site.
One reason we had to start over was the diminishing returns changes were expensive and time consuming. To be successful we had to account not just for the immediate impact but the years of work that follow.
We landed on a modular system, each core idea has a self-contained module. The modules stack into pages. When something isn’t relevant, it’s not displayed. States can be changed, added or removed without changing the entire page. Customers can focus on a single primary action in each module.
2018 ● Product Design Lead
We redesigned and launched a new flagship mobile app. And it was modular so the business could easily deliver new value. I was the advocate for the customer with 7 development teams, a short budget and very little time.
Kohl's ● 2020 ● Senior Product Designer
Customers at Kohl's often need to carefully manage a budget. Often they'll have to buy some school supplies now and wait until payday for a pair of shoes. Without a way to save those items, it's incredibly difficult to remember and find them again a few weeks later.