Designing for what people find hard to say

I came to design sideways rather than by plan, and stayed because of what the work asks of you. Designing well means paying close attention to people who are mid-sentence, mid-decision, or mid-difficulty, and then being careful about what you build on top of what you heard.

Most of my projects sit close to something tender. A health portal where the honest answer to a question is embarrassing. A couple trying to stay close across nine time zones. A partner at home managing a household alone while trying to sound fine on a video call. In each case the interface is the least interesting part; what matters is which signals a system chooses to notice, and which it quietly discards.

So my practice is built around evidence discipline. I separate what I observed from what I concluded from what I am merely proposing, and I label it, in the work and on this site. It makes for less confident-sounding case studies. It also makes them true, and it means that when I do make a strong claim, it is worth something.

I work across research and interface craft rather than choosing one. I run the interviews, do the synthesis, draw the flows, build the design system, and then sit in usability sessions watching my own assumptions come apart. I am at my best on problems where the emotional stakes are real and the product answer is not obvious.