Systems synthesis
There's usually one problem hiding inside five separately-scoped issues. I map the states, relationships, and tradeoffs underneath it, so the team builds from one shared picture instead of five patched symptoms.
Senior UX Designer, based in St. Louis
By day I design for complex enterprise software, the kind with a hundred edge cases and no clean answer. After an earlier life in footwear design and marketing, I still like that kind of problem best.
Four areas, and what that's looked like in real projects.
There's usually one problem hiding inside five separately-scoped issues. I map the states, relationships, and tradeoffs underneath it, so the team builds from one shared picture instead of five patched symptoms.
On a big project, half the battles aren't about the design. They're about what's actually decided, and where that decision lives. I track what's confirmed, what's still proposed, what's evidence versus assumption. Then I write down the why, so nobody has to reconstruct the reasoning from memory six months later.
I build the workflow around the AI tools I use: evaluation, delivery, and a handoff document that tells the next tool what's already been decided, so it doesn't start from scratch.
I design what happens at every step a component or workflow can hit, including the broken ones, and build in accessibility from the first sketch, not the last.
Architecting a shared system-level surface across grids, records, and responsive contexts for a complex case-management product.
End-to-end ownershipSystems thinkingAmbiguity reduction Password protected → 02Designing evidence-backed, AI-assisted evaluation modes with guardrails against false certainty, piloted live against real cases.
Responsible AIEvidence synthesisExperimentation Password protected → 03A self-built evidence, rationale, and retrieval system connecting research, decisions, and delivery for people and AI agents alike.
Knowledge architectureDesignOpsSource-of-truth design Password protected → 04Turned a one-line request to collapse form sections into a full interaction system: indicator semantics, save-timing rules, and per-case persistence for dense enterprise forms.
Interaction designAccessibilityState & edge-case modeling Password protected →Case studies show finished work. This is the unfinished stuff: small, working experiments, documented and interesting beats polished.
Click the orange blob for a small, slightly cosmic piece of design wisdom.
Try itRates how much weight a genealogy record type can actually carry, and why.
Try itSteps a synthetic genealogy claim through the five stages of the Genealogical Proof Standard.
Try itType a word. It fills with a real generated maze, then resolves into solid letters.
Try itI'm a systems thinker who does my best work in the parts other people find exhausting: where what users expect, what the product actually does, and what engineering can realistically build all pull in different directions. My job is to figure out what's actually going on, get a cross-functional team aligned on it, and take the problem from a vague first conversation to a shipped outcome, then write it all down so nobody has to reverse-engineer my thinking later.
Reach out for the password to a case study, or to talk about a role.