A bit about me

I recently joined Whirlpool as a User Experience Designer working on IoT. My work combines the physical and digital worlds in the appliance industry to bring the best possible in-home experiences to our customers.

Outside of work, my goals this year are to improve my woodworking skills, learn to renovate a bathroom or kitchen, and build a cool home office setup.

Experience

What I value as a designer

Intention & justification

Any pixel, user flow, font weight, color... you name it - I never want to make a design decision that is not intentional. Random decisions & unintentional design can lead to inconsistencies, poor user experiences, and confusion when presenting or discussing with stakeholders and developers.

Accessible design

This is pretty standard, but accessibility has always been a core focus in my work. Accessibility should be a foundation in design & development opposed to an add-on at the end when all the other work is done.

Communication

Design is all about communication. How can an interface communicate to a user how to complete a task? How can I communicate my ideas to stakeholders & managers? How can I communicate handoff specs to a developer with as little clarification as possible? 

Critical feedback

I love getting & giving feedback about anything design related. It's how we use other sets of eyes to uncover what we might miss from staring at something for so long. It's important as designers to know how to give and take critical/blunt feedback and use it as an advantage to improve our work.

Design to scale

If I'm working to design an interface, I'll typically create two versions: a minimum viable product (MVP) that we want to ship immediately, and a version showing where we could take the design given no limitations. Future updates & additions will require less reworking of an interface, it'll maintain familiarity with users, and future proofs development if a developer knows how to structure their code in preparation for what could come down the road.