I recently started partaking in the WAVE Advisor program that is led by BUILT BY GIRLS, an awesome team that gives high school and college women access to resources that help them explore and land internships and jobs in tech. I offered to write a newsletter for BUILT BY GIRLS that covers the topic of the types of career paths available in tech and wanted to share some of that information here for anyone in the Medium community this could help.

I majored in marketing in college and, unsurprisingly, worked in advertising for years before transitioning into becoming a product…

For the past few years, I’ve gotten into the habit of replacing New Year’s resolutions with more tangible goals because I always felt resolutions were too vague and that’s why we never keep them. Goals, broken down by categories such as ‘bad habits to break’, ‘new things to learn’, and ‘places to travel’ are easier to track and easier to accomplish because they’re specific and tangible. One of the goals I set for 2019 was to write at least one blog post per month. …

The lifecycle of developing a new feature for a product can be explained through a variety of analogies, but I think the changing of seasons best represents not only the phases of feature development, but also the emotions we as product designers go through (this may also be applicable to engineers and product managers though I can’t speak on behalf of them). To me, each season is not only reflective of the weather, but also very specific feelings, influenced by nostalgia, holidays, the media, and seasonal activities. Whether our associations are positive or negative, there are different ways we can…

This blog title is by no means a reflection of my feelings for Slack itself. As a product designer, I love Slack. Communicating with GIPHs? Yes. Customized channels that cater to every niche? Yes. Integrations with other applications for a seamless experience? Yes. But despite all the great things about Slack as a product and a company, it feels like we’ve possibly opened a portal into the darkest and most perverse parts of humanity (slightly joking, but mostly serious).

As we all have seen happen since the dawn of the internet, people who are able to hide their identity behind…

I am not one to see movies in theaters frequently mostly due to the exorbitant costs and fear of bed bugs (is this just a New York thing?), but I recently went to see “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” after hearing much fanfare — And it’s one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. This probably comes as no shock given all the hype around this movie, but the Product Designer in me wanted to review this movie from a designer’s point of view because every good experience can be tied back to my product design principles.

Differentiate

I am by no means what people would consider a ‘gamer.’ Not due to lack of interest, but mostly because I don’t have enough patience to play video games long enough to get good at them or even past the first few minutes. Games these days have complex storylines, many controls to keep track of, and require patience and an investment of time. Also, the majority of video games tend to fall into a handful of categories that don’t really fit my interests, such as sports or shooting…or shooting while playing a sport. …

A recent online purchase experience made me think about the extreme analysis paralysis we encounter on an everyday basis given the infinite choices available to us online. I simply needed a lightbulb for a desk lamp. Pre-Amazon, one would choose from the few options at the local hardware store and be done with it. To avoid having to walk to an actual store and interact with real people, I searched for light bulbs on Amazon and got over 200,000 results. …

When you think of data and numbers and tables, ‘sexy’ probably isn’t the first word that comes to mind, but that perception can be changed with a well designed dashboard. One requirement of a successful dashboard is having a strong backend foundation that has the right queries and databases so that the information being presented is accurate and timely. But in my opinion, another key element for a successful dashboard is what the user sees, experiences and remembers from the front end.

When developing a dashboard you can find creative ways to serve up data to users in innovative ways…