Broad experience
My career has two distinct but connected chapters.
The first as an interaction design specialist — working across diverse input types, interaction paradigms and platforms, defining the guidelines and systems that enabled consistency and quality at scale.
The second as a product design leader — applying those foundations in real products, expanding my experience of the systems, processes and people management that ship good work under real constraints.
Together this range of work gives me the ability to think at platform level and component level simultaneously, and of the user's experience at both.
Why me?
I read situations quickly — in how teams work, in products, in user flows — including the unexamined assumptions that look like alignment but aren't. I work to make those gaps explicit and actionable.
I'm not a consultant who hands over a deck. I work alongside product leaders and teams closely enough to actually change things — whether that means defining the structural foundation a product needs before it gets built wrong, untangling an organization that has stopped working toward a shared goal, or redirecting interaction decisions that are serving internal needs at the user's expense.
Think Head of Design Experience, Principal Design Strategist, Design Systems & Strategy Lead, UX Coordination — but I also design ways forward.
"Jane is the best Design professional I have worked with. Connecting the mission and big picture to the details, while always keeping focused on the customer and user, is challenging for a lot of companies. It takes real skill to navigate those waters and ensure strategy is formulated well, understood, agreed and implemented properly. Jane's ability to see the big picture and know how to get people there makes all the difference."
— Bob, Co-Founder & CTO
"Jane has a fantastic mix of creative vision and attention to detail, and her ability to zoom in and out from high level strategic thinking to down in the weeds execution has been a godsend in our start-up environment. One of the top three hires I have ever made."
— Tim, SVP Product
Ways to work with Me
I work with startups, scale-ups and established companies — fractional, advisory or project-based.
Design work fails in predictable ways — and usually not because of bad design. It fails because the wrong thing was built, or the right thing was built badly, or the organization wasn't structured to build anything coherently. Twenty-five years across startups, agencies and corporations has given me a reliable ability to see which of these is happening and what to do about it — working at the level where the problem actually originates, not just where it's most visible.
Here are three ways people typically engage me:
Structural Foundation — defining what kind of thing you're building before you build it
Before an architect breaks ground they ask: is this a family home or a transitional space? Permanent or temporary? Who will live here and how? The answers to these type of questions define everything from there on — materials, size, permanence, modularity. If questions like these are skipped, teams and the product pay for it later in technical debt, roadmap confusion and misaligned teams.
I work with product leaders to define the structural foundation their product needs before those decisions get made by default.
Questions to explore
Does your team have a shared mental model of what the product is and what it's becoming?
Would engineering, design and product describe your product's structure the same way?
Are new features being added to a coherent system or accumulated onto an unclear one?
Examples on how to address
• product mapping sessions • framework definition • modular UX/UI architecture • journey mapping that connects user needs to product structure • platform-as-product strategy
Organizational Coherence — ensuring the work adds up to something
Autonomous teams are efficient — and also prone to diverging without knowing it, optimizing for their own goals while the overall user journey fragments, or baking incorrect assumptions into the product at significant cost to fix later.
I help organizations see where their structure is working against their product design goals and build a common understanding of how each team's work supports the whole.
Questions to explore
How does each team know where their work fits in the overall user journey?
How do you know work isn't being replicated elsewhere in the organization?
Are your teams organized around business metrics or around the phases of your user's experience?
Examples on how to address
• cross-functional alignment sessions • funnel and dependency mapping • design guild establishment • ways of working that scale beyond the design team • introducing a cross-functional coordination layer
Interaction & UX Integrity — ensuring product decisions hold up against user expectations
Every product makes an implicit contract with its users. When that contract is broken — even for legitimate business reasons — users experience it as unfairness, and the damage to trust is disproportionate to whatever the decision was trying to protect.
I bring an experienced eye to where product and UX decisions are serving internal needs at the user's expense — and where there is high potential in rethinking solutions without sacrificing the business objective.
Questions to explore
When you changed something your users were used to, did the value outweigh the effort of relearning?
Do you know which behaviours your users experience as unfair and are putting retention at risk?
Can you tell which decisions were made for the user and which were made for the organization?
Examples on how to address
• interaction architecture review • UX assessment • prototyping and concept definition • cross-platform coherence • design direction and oversight — not sprint execution
case studies
Every project brings different challenges. Some examples:
The company had the core capabilities of a working product and a growing client list but hadn't defined an architecture in which to build them — every new engagement was effectively a custom build.
ACTION
Defined a modular UX/UI framework shifting the product from custom-built per engagement to configurable within a shared structure. Developed a guided journey mapping tool scaling that approach into PM-level planning.
OUTCOME
The framework became the structural foundation for platform strategy, enabling new product lines within the same architecture.
A fast-paced schedule, tight deadlines and under resourced; growing teams led to inconsistencies and compromised usability.
ACTION
Introduce a Design System and template UIs.
OUTCOME
Improved usability, consistency and efficiency.
Changing technical constraints and changing business priorities.
ACTION
Applied systems approach to process, created prototype service and modular UX to deliver designs on time.
OUTCOME
Prevented hold ups in sprint cycles, allowed for changes in direction, achieved with minimal resources.
Work was aligned to company structure rather than the user's experience or business goals leading to growing tech debt and obscured priorities.
ACTION
Change silo'd work teams to collaborative goal-oriented project teams. Introduce UX funnel methods to focus work on supporting product goals for user needs.
OUTCOME
Fixed disjointed UX funnels, provided transparency into tech debt vs goals, enhanced collaborative problem-solving. Aligned competing strategies and identified priorities.
A mismatch between design concept and technical architecture capabilities meant designs were largely unusable but multiple teams were already building and marketing had commited on value prop.
ACTION
Reconciled mismatch with: audit, gap analysis, realigned UX strategy, collaborative workshops. Centralized UX design work around a "lead" platform (Android) and de-prioritized designing UX or features where uncertainty still lay.
OUTCOME
Prevented hold ups for developers and engineering, stayed close to original intent but changed to implementable rather than original "bluesky" product - hit release schedule.
Project clients include
