I want to know what the system actually does before I decide what it should look like.

Background

I came to design sideways. Four and a half years in a biochemistry lab, then cognitive science with an HCI specialization at UC San Diego, then a Master of Engineering in Product Design & Development Management at Northwestern.

The lab is the part that still shows up in how I work. Bench science teaches you that the hard part of a problem is usually the measurement, not the answer — and that a result you cannot explain is not a result yet. That turns out to describe fraud tooling almost exactly.

How I work

I spend longer than most designers on what the system actually does before deciding what it should look like. In risk products the interface is downstream of a model, a policy, and a regulator, and none of those are negotiable from Figma. Understanding them first is what makes the design work survive contact with engineering.

Most of the last several years has been fraud and risk at Kount, an Equifax company — payments fraud, chargebacks, account protection, and authorized payment protection, all on the Kount 360 platform, whose original information architecture I designed. I work closely with data science, because in these products the interesting decisions live in the seam between what a model produces and what a person is willing to defend.

I also speak Spanish, which has repeatedly put me in stakeholder conversations I would otherwise have received secondhand.

Elsewhere

Seattle, working remotely. Outside of work: hiking, swimming, beach volleyball, and soccer when the weather cooperates, and guitar, new breweries, and the classics when it doesn't. This site is built with Astro and deployed from GitHub — notes on how and why are coming.