What is your role at Decent?
I'm Decent's User Experience Designer. My design work aims to help folks have the best online experience with Decent as possible: whether it's accessing the information they need, making sense of complicated healthcare jargon, or registering and keeping up with their healthcare coverage. I focus on building scalable design programs and keeping design and development in lock-step.
What is your background?
I've spent most of my career inside or alongside startups, though I hopped around from marketing, administration, and project management roles before finding my design groove. Seven years ago, I was doing project management and administration at a biotech startup called Selventa. Selventa's development work piqued my interest, so I started studying front-end development in my off-hours. Within a few months, I transitioned to Selventa's Web Designer/Developer.
From there I was hooked! After Selventa, I joined a scrappy R&D team inside MIT's Office of Digital Learning, where my team built out an experimental social learning platform. Then, I worked at Richline Digital as their UI/UX Manager, helping them redesign their homegrown eCommerce CMS to support a growing number of portfolio brands.
After that and immediately before joining Decent, I was a design consultant at thoughtbot, where I helped teams develop and scale their product design and strategy efforts.
Why is improving healthcare important to you?
I had a mysterious autoimmune health scare a few years back. Though I was lucky to have comprehensive health coverage at the time, my luck didn't feel like it extended very far: even with great coverage, I couldn't get but 10 minutes of my PCP's time. For months I was passed from specialist to specialist, feeling lost and crumby all the while. I finally went out of my network so that I could be treated by a practitioner who spent time with me. We were able to talk, look at the whole picture of my health, and I finally started feeling better. Feeling cared for - like I had an ally in my pursuit to heal - was a mystifyingly elusive feeling when my health was in a bad place. And that was with what is considered a top-tier health care plan. Doctors deserve to have the bandwidths to offer quality care, and patients deserve to be met with compassion and attention. And what's cool: this model of care is possible. Affordably. So why not make it happen, right?
Why were you motivated to join Decent?
Dreaming of ways that healthcare can be improved is one thing; doing it is another thing entirely. I chose to join Decent so that I could contribute to a rock-solid mission, help solve meaningful and challenging problems, and do so while working alongside awesome, talented people.
Describe something not-work related you are passionate about.
I studied art in college. I chose to do so for the draw (heh) of studio time and I surprised myself in cultivating a passion for art history. Now, I enjoy reading about art, visiting museums and gallery shows, and my continued practice of making things (currently on the docket: learning to throw pottery, starting an herbal chocolate brand with a friend, and sharpening my watercolor and illustration chops).
