About me

I've used a design system, built one, and documented one, in that order. I started out consuming Veneer as a product designer on TechPulse, where I built a data visualization system from scratch because the one thing our design system didn't cover was the thing my product ran on. Then I moved onto the design system team and helped build the component libraries themselves. Now I lead the documentation for it.

That order matters more than it sounds. Every decision I've made about documentation comes from having been the person on the other end of it, and every decision about components comes from having had to rebuild fifty of them. I care about the parts of design that make it possible for other people to do good work: the structure, the documentation, the process, the scaffolding that turns one person's good idea into something a whole team can build on.

Right now that means leading Veneer's fourth major version. We're rebuilding the information architecture on research rather than convention, moving to tooling that takes our team off the critical path, and working out what documentation needs to look like when an AI is reading it as often as a person is. Our content strategist and I published some of that research in Design Systems: We Have a Naming Problem, on why a label most design systems use doesn't land with the people reading it.

I was the first person on the documentation team, and I mentored the next few people who joined. It's now 8 to 10 people spanning design, writing, development, and QA, and how that team works is my responsibility as much as what it ships. I've written more about that here.

What I'm proudest of is starting the documentation team and site, and watching both grow. The pages I first built myself now make up a site used by thousands of people at HP every year, and Veneer went on to win a UX Design Award. The culture we built on the team along the way is the part that made the rest of it possible.

Outside of work, I'll try anything crafty: cross stitch, embroidery, crochet, sewing. When I'm not making something, I'm probably playing Stardew Valley or trying to make my sheprador puppy, Fig, Instagram famous. Shameless plug: @figgygsdmix.