Hi, I'm Anie, a product designer in Los Angeles. Most of what I've worked on is the normal, everyday things everyone has to do, like refilling a prescription, paying a bill, or booking a room. They can be unnecessarily complicated or hard to use, and making them simpler is what I care about.
I started off my career in graphic and web design before moving into product. What really shaped how I work was my time at early and mid-stage startups, working closely with founders, PMs, and engineers. I stopped obsessing over the one perfect screen and started paying attention to everything around it that decides whether that screen can even exist. I've also learned that the data doesn't always agree with itself. A design can do well in usability testing and still lose an A/B test, and a lot of the work is figuring out which signal to trust.
A lot of that comes down to people more than pixels. I talk to actual users whenever I can, not just session recordings and dashboards, because the real reasons behind what people do rarely show up in the numbers. I care just as much about how a team works together. The best teams I've been on asked each other for help constantly and never treated it as weakness, and I think a big part of leading is drawing out what people already know instead of just telling them what to do.
I've loved art and design my whole life, and it's something I'll always care about. So much of the world is more complicated than it needs to be, and I really believe design has the power to fix that. It still tends to get pushed to the sidelines, treated like a nice extra instead of something that matters, and I want to be part of the bigger conversations where the real decisions get made. I also love getting other people excited about design and showing them how much better it can make things.
Outside of work, life is full. Between the kids and two dogs, our weekends usually go to parks, the beach, or a museum. I also love to travel for how much it exposes me to, like new people, different cultures, and other ways of living, and it's where a lot of my inspiration comes from.