I am a backcountry skier, trad climber, & dirt road cyclist.

Since mid 2017, I've been the design lead for the Design Systems team, where my focus is on elevating the quality of experiences on Etsy (native and web) and maintaining consistency throughout our design and front-end engineer org.

I am constantly communicating with designers and engineers to educate and push them towards solutions that provide a better UX and more consistent UI. At the same time, I'm working with my own engineers to build out global enhancements (such as rebuilding navigational spaces) that set new standards and raise all ships. In the background, I'm building and maintaining our codified toolkits so that other designers and engineers have pre-built components that are on-brand, accessible, and consistent out of the box.

Previously, I spent my first three years focusing on the Etsy seller experience, building products to help our sellers manage their inventory, navigate their tools, and onboard as first-time sellers. Simultaneously, I was designing and writing code to patternize components in our front-end web toolkit and disseminating knowledge to fellow designers and engineers.

When I first joined design systems, I was the sole systems representative for all of Etsy's buyer experience. As a team of one, I was asked to be efficient and nimble in ways that product teams couldn't be. I was my own product manager, designer, engineer, and data analyst. I would spend my time identifying UI and UX problems with our product, getting buy-in from product owners, designing and building solutions, and running my own A/B experiments.

On Etsy, our oldest codebase and most outdated UI also happens to be our most important page: the listing detail page. It was built desktop first, and therefore lacks some love that makes it particularly quirky for mobile users. Given the importance of mobile web as a platform for e-commerce, I set out to identify some opportunities to make improvements to the user experience of this page, keeping in mind my limited resources.

The base font size on most of Etsy.com is 14px, which gets applied to body copy, buttons, and form elements, including the variations select element on the listing detail page. However, on iOS devices, for accessibility reasons, text in form elements cannot be smaller than 16px. This results in an automatic zoom when a user interacts with this select element, adding a horizontal scroll bar and making content on the rest of the page more frustrating to interact with.

The fix was simple enough: change the font size of the select element to 16px. However, being a sensitive part of the product, I wanted to validate this change with data to make sure that there weren't other unknown implications. I set this up as an A/B experiment with 14px as the control and 16px as the variant, QA'd for any visual bugs, and ran the test for about a week. Ultimately, we saw a neutral change to revenue but a slight increase to users adding listings to their cart, giving me the confidence to ramp the 16px version up to 100%.

As one of two product designers at an early stage start-up, my work spanned from product strategization, user testing, and high level UX design to UI design and front-end development.

My focus was on UI and UX design for client products and marketing sites, with a touch of front-end development and occassional illustration and type design.

Post-graduation, I spent my time developing my design skills and working for an assortment of advertising agencies and branding agencies before landing on product design as a direction of interest.

Bachelor of Science degree with a major in Business and a minor in Studio Art.