I like reducing complexity in systems that grow complicated slowly.
Over the last decade I’ve designed for people doing real work: medical staff checking in patients, teachers managing classrooms between bells, revenue teams navigating enterprise software, and lately gardeners trying to remember what’s planted where. The industries change. The pattern doesn’t. Increasingly that work means designing the AI agents inside these systems, and deciding where they should act and where a person should stay in control.
Systems accumulate exceptions, workarounds, and edge cases until everyday tasks take far more effort than they should. Most of my job is finding where that happened and making the common path obvious again. I learn the most by building, watching how people actually behave, and iterating from there.
Something that’s stuck with me
Years ago I was watching someone use one of our iPad apps at a user conference. She said she wished it had a place for notes. It did. I scrolled the page, and there it was, the whole time. She teared up and stepped away for a second.
The feature wasn’t missing. The scrollbar was, because iPadOS hides it. Without that one affordance, the notes might as well not have existed. I’ve pushed for visible scrollbars, and visible affordances in general, ever since. A feature people can’t find isn’t a feature.
Things I’ve realized
- If customers build a spreadsheet, they’re telling you something.
- Most workflow problems start long before the screen.
- The best opportunities hide inside the workarounds people invent.
- Experts value speed and muscle memory over novelty.
- People don’t read. (Bonus points if you’ve made it this far!)
Things I’m still figuring out
- Why gardeners spend more time planning than planting.
- What product teams can learn from the tools users build for themselves.
- Why enterprise software so often slows down the experts using it.
Away from the screen, I’m usually sewing or experimenting with hydroponics in my kitchen. My Pod Planner started as an attempt to solve my own gardening problem and turned into a reminder that the best product ideas often begin as workarounds.