As this Alphabet (Google) research lab’s design/product/front-end specialist, I Ied and executed product, design, and UI development across a wide range of initiatives. Here I exercised my ability to synthesize user needs in complex scientific problem spaces, building easy-to-use software research scientists working at the cutting edge of biology employed to see their work in a new way. Highlights:Organizational leadership——Managed software engineering team during restructuring process. Defined full-stack engineering hiring process, managed software engineering team, worked with C-suite and senior scientific stakeholders to help restructure the wider Computing organization, and led group sessions (like design sprints) to help that wider team understand itself and articulate its goals.Design leadership——I represented design as a discipline, on Calico scientists’ wider scientific communication efforts, including design talks internally and bespoke data visualization and figure-level graphic work for scientific publications.Calico Data Platform——Researched, designed, and built React front-end and some Python back-end for fast turnaround of routine genomics analyses, with a point-and-click user interface to submit samples to genomic sequencing lab, run pipelines, and explore results with rich interactive data visualizations. This mission-critical infrastructure vastly improved Calico scientists’ data experience.Research apps (point-and-click data analysis)——More or less single-handedly built scientific applications to empower cutting-edge biology research and change the way scientists look at and work with data, including a drag-and-drop WebGL and React-based app for interactive analysis of scientific data on biological networks, including functional enrichment analysis and high-performance visualization of genome-wide data.

I helped shepherd Iodine (acquired by GoodRx in 2016) from mere “idea-on-a-napkin” to several products bringing a human voice and real-world data to the world of medication education and evaluation. As part of the company leadership team, I headed up our design crew, and later was our de-facto product leader. Highlights:Product & design leadership——I brought product, design, and user experience research experience to bear across all of iodine's initiatives. I led our multidisciplinary design team, coaching and mentoring, helping the design team become more technical, led design sprints, represented Iodine product leadership in fundraising and partner meetings, and more.Start——Led conception, design, and overall product development of Start, a novel app and program to help people taking an antidepressant learn whether the medication was helping them feel better. And if not, to work with their doctor to find other treatments. Apple chose Start as a CareKit launch partner.iodine.com——Called “The Yelp of drugs” by TIME Magazine, iodine.com was a data-driven medication information resource combining medical research and real-world experience from user-contributed findings and a unique survey of more than 100,000 people about their experience with medications. iodine.com featured novel approaches to drug info, to help people understand what to expect from medications, compare drugs, and take away clear bottom-line information about benefits and risks. From launch, the website evolved to 6-8% week over week growth and hundreds of thousands of visitors per month. It was the 2018 Webby award winner for best health website. iodine.com was also an early product built with React, which I and our design team used to ship and test prototype data-driven product experiences.

Collaborating with FDA’s chief of health informatics and teams across the organization, and under contract to FDA, part of a small team that built openFDA from scratch.openFDA——openFDA is an ongoing FDA effort to share important public health datasets—about drugs, medical devices, and foods. An important government transparency project, openFDA consists of modern, well-documented, open-source APIs and data downloads, and an interactive website for public health data. openFDA set a standard for government data sharing. I ran interdisciplinary sprints with FDA teams, created the website, helped design the API endpoints and dataset organization, documented almost all of the APIs in detail, ran public training, and spoke about openFDA at conferences.

As part of Google's small but growing UX organization, I worked embedded with product teams or as a consultant to help them evolve existing products and cook up new ones. I also spent a great deal of my time at Google bringing design to under-resourced teams, and promulgating design education across the company. Projects too numerous to enumerate, but highlights include:Design training——Conceived and evolved two-day hands-on UX and visual design training program for non-designers and personally trained more than 700 Googlers around the world. This effort was developed for small teams that didn’t have formal design support, and scaled with the engineering education team to become Google’s top–rated Googler–led engineering education course.Search——As part of the small Search UX team, looked after, improved, and designed new experiences at the core of Google—its home page, search result pages, translated search, and more.Suggest——Led design for coherent search, suggestion, and results experience—also known as Search in Small Spaces—across all platforms where people Google: the Web,, mobile phones, web browsers, client applications, etc.Public data——Helped the acquired Gapminder team—whose goal was to share important public statistical data and visualization tools with the world—adapt their experience to Google, and brought those public data & statistics to Google search results.

As the first UX specialist at Google’s for-public-good organization, I brought design thinking and execution to projects in public health, climate change, and scientific data. Highlights:Google Flu Trends——Using search activity, Google Flu Trends produced good estimates of official flu activity indicators in dozens of countries, several days earlier than the official data became available. We made this important health data accessible to the public and useful to epidemiologists.Pandemic response & public health——In 2009, a potentially deadly strain of H1N1 influenza spread rapidly across the globe. Our Google.org team worked closely with public health authorities (including CDC and HHS) to use Google’s important platform to respond. Designed search results, vaccine finder apps, and more to aid in this response.Climate change adaptation platform——I was the UX designer on a small team exploring how to organize and make climate and weather data useful for climate change adaptation. We designed ways to explore meteorological and climate data, and sought to develop a platform and application-authoring environment to help governments, NGOs, and universities bring data to decision-making about how to adapt to climate change.Health & health search——Scattered contributions to Google Health and to health search designs, to help people find accurate and relevant information when asking questions about their health.Design sprints——Helped teams work through design & product strategy for efforts in translating important medical content on Wikipedia to more languages, satellite imagery analysis, home energy usage, and more.

Led design and helped in a small way grow this company from a handful of employees to more than 25 by my departure. Highlights:Design leadership——Led UX and product design, created a new brand with a bold and contemporary look and feel, and strong opinion on Marketcircle's products at the core of Mac business software. Helped hire and coach designers who built great products at Marketcircle and went onto Facebook, Shopify, and Apple.Billings——Designed this trend-setting time tracking and invoicing app from scratch. Responsible for UX, UI, marketing materials, and instructional product design & writing. Also built Billings’ website. This product went on to win an Apple Design Award.Daylite——Redesigned Marketcircle's flagship CRM product Daylite, transforming it from its initial major release to a reimagined Daylite 3.

Performed and analyzed usability tests on text input software and BlackBerry 77xx0-series keypad design to optimize input speed.

Stewarded & wrote content for two major editions of the venerable Apple Human Interface Guidelines and other UX evangelism materials, organized the UX clinic at WWDC, and consulted on Mac UX 1:1 with dozens of developers big and small to ensure they developed the apps with best-in-class Mac OS X user experiences.