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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
