I’m a product and design leader, innovation strategist, and UX designer based in Bay Area, California.
QuickBooks Contractor Ecosystem
Intuit (2016 - 2018)
Discovering and driving a massive, end-to-end initiative to bridge several disconnected QuickBooks online products to transform them into the trusted platform for small businesses to easily work with independent contractors throughout the year. By innovating across 3 key touchpoints shared between them, we made it possible for small businesses to onboard independent contractors by inviting them to self-set-up, improve cashflow visibility, streamlining invoices and bills, and introducing direct deposits to pay contractors. Last but not least, by working together using the QuickBooks Ecosystem, small businesses and self-employed could breeze through tax time with a single click while reducing their tax compliance risks.
Within the first 9 months of launching the minimally lovable product (MLP), we acquired over 500,000 active customers, generated nearly $2 million in revenue, and saw over $62 million dollars be paid to independent contractors via direct deposit. It received glowing reviews from small businesses, self-employed, and accountants, which is why it continues to be part of QuickBooks today. Additionally, the features and patterns introduced by the QuickBooks Contractor Ecosystem were eventually scaled out to serve other parts of QuickBooks, as well.
TurboTax Self-Employed Postfile Experience
Intuit (2016-2017)
Providing TurboTax Self-Employed customers with a complimentary one-year access to QuickBooks Self-Employed so they could continue to save time and money long after filing their annual taxes. With QBSE, customers could start their tax year off right by auto-organizing their finances, estimating their self-employed taxes for the upcoming year, auto-tracking deductions to reduce their tax bill, and digitizing receipts with a snap of their mobile camera.
After launching this experience as part of the new TurboTax Self-Employed offering in 2017, it led to an unprecedented 410,000 QuickBooks Self-Employed activations within a single tax season, which far surpassed our KPI goals by 300%. It has continued to evolve and stay part of the TurboTax Self-Employed experience ever since.
QuickBooks Self-Employed
Intuit (2015-2017)
Building a lean, mean, year-round tax-saving machine designed to make life and cash flow easier for millions of independent contractors around the world. Using QBSE, customers can auto-detangle their personal and business expenses, auto-track deductions, estimate self-employed taxes to withhold, send trackable payment-enabled invoices, and access benefits such as healthcare coverage. During tax time, customers can securely export their data to TurboTax or share it with their accountants to accelerate their annual tax-filing process.
After its release, QuickBooks Self-Employed grew to over 500,000 customers across 6 countries within its first 2 years, making it one of Intuit’s fastest-growing products. It was the first app that let independent contractors distinguish between their personal and work expenses with a click or swipe, and set rules to auto-categorize recurring transactions. The outcome of our work catalyzed Intuit to recognize independent contractors as a distinct core customer segment, and rename its Small Business Group business division to become the Small Business and Self-Employed Group. Furthermore, its success inspired Intuit to launch other products tailored to independent contractors, such as TurboTax Self-Employed.
CareFinder.gov
IDEO + Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services + Center for Clinical Standards and Quality + US Department of Human Services (2014)
Streamlining dense CMS data and 8 existing care compare tools into one unified, intuitive portal that lets beneficiaries along with their caregivers find, compare, and choose the right care providers to proactively plan a continuum of care.
After our team shared the final designs between 2014 to 2015, many key stakeholders across CMS and other government officials embraced its potential to make a positive impact on the quality of care provided in America. In 2020, Medicare.gov launched the initial version as Care Compare. More info available on Medicare FAQ,, Medicare.gov, and CMS.gov.
Relay Clinical Trial Ecosystem
IDEO + Panasonic Health (2014)
Humanizing clinical trials by introducing an ecosystem of interconnected devices and apps to streamline study recruitment, onboarding, facilitation, check-ins, and data analysis. By seamlessly integrating into the patient participant’s life, this ecosystem automatically tracks their data to reduce logistical challenges, provide better patient support, ensures data accuracy, and timely intervention to course-correct.
Elevating the patient experience also leads to fewer patient dropout rates, requires fewer patients to be recruited, improves data insights, and potentially shortens the clinical trial study duration—all of which can add up to significant cost-savings.
This work has not yet launched.
Journey Connections
IDEO + Eli Lilly Oncology (2013-2014)
Enabling oncology clinic staff to improve outcomes for their vulnerable cancer patients by providing them with a more holistic and personalized care experience. After each cancer treatment session, patients receive a carefully curated set of vetted resources that improves their quality of life and supplements their treatment.
The pilot version was released across a small network of oncology clinics in 2014 who began leveraging the Journey Connections app to provide personalized resources to cancer patients. It worked so well, that to our surprise, the oncology clinics even began using it to train their nurses—for which it became a 2016 MM&M Award Finalist in the Best Digital Initiative for Non-Consumers category.
Innovator's Accelerator
IDEO + Apollo Lightspeed/University of Phoenix (2012)
Designing a bespoke, interactive online learning experience that lets busy executives master the 5 key skills of disruptive innovation which enables them to transform ideas into impact. This online experience is taught by the illustrious co-authors of “Innovator’s Accelerator”: the late Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School, Hal Gregersen of INSEAD, and Jeff Dyer of Brigham Young University's Marriott School of Management. By letting students immerse themselves into the content, participate in engaging discussions, and practice skill-building exercises, they were able to learn at their own pace from virtually anywhere. As they progressed through the course, each student’s unique “Innovator’s DNA badge” would evolve to visually indicate their mastery of each innovation skill while their “Impact Score” showcased their contributions to the course. Lastly, students could save their favorite content from throughout the course on a “Take Aways” board to reference long after the course was completed.
When Innovator’s Accelerator launched its pilot program in January of 2013, most online education platforms were accustomed to squeezing their content into off-the-shelf CRM systems, which often resulted in disconnected, disorienting, and unforgiving online learning experiences. Joshua Kim of Inside Higher Ed reviewed Innovator's Accelerator in 2013 and described it as: “a glimpse into the future of online learning.” In 2014, it won an Edison Silver Award in the Knowledge and Skill-Building Platforms category. Since then, it has heavily influenced numerous present-day learning experiences and edtech platforms.
Casebook
IDEO + Casebook PBC/Case Commons (2011-2012)
A family-first case management system that empowers caseworkers to provide more positive outcomes for vulnerable children and their families. Casebook maximizes the caseworkers' time in the field by helping them visualize complex support networks, guiding caseworkers to take key actions in a timely fashion, integrating with other government databases to automatically update information, reducing data re-entry, and organizing case data to automatically generate complex reports for court reviews. Throughout all of this, Casebook proactively surfaces contextual insights to help case teams make carefully-coordinated, data-informed decisions that make a lasting, holistic, and positive impact for the entire family.
It was launched across the state of Indiana in 2012 to serve the Department of Childcare Services. Since then, it has increased face-to-face contact with family caseworkers by 13.8%, reduced the average wait period for assessment to be completed, and accelerated the training and onboarding of new caseworkers'. For this, it has won numerous awards, including a 2015 Code for America Technology Award. Read more about it here.
Prepaid Bank
IDEO + Green Dot (2011)
Making banking accessible and trustworthy for everyone—including unbanked, underbanked, and banked individuals, so that they’re able to safely shop online with confidence without compromising their personal bank accounts, grow financially-savvy spending habits, stay on top of their finances, and build credit without jeopardizing their financial or personal security.
Through this work, we helped Green Dot understand how to optimize their offerings for underbanked and unbanked individuals, while also finding a way to elevate their service offerings for banked customers, too. Although this work didn’t launch with this exact vision proposed by our team, Green Dot did wind up acquiring Bonneville Bank shortly thereafter towards the tail end of 2011. Eventually, they also launched Go2Bank to expand its carefully-branded offerings to unbanked individuals, which included a lot of features similar to the ones we helped identify and propose back in 2011.
CaptionCall
Method + Sorenson (2009)
Empowering the hard-of-hearing and deaf community to carry out phone conversations with confidence and without compromise. By balancing form and function, this sleek landline phone provides real-time captions by combining automated dictation-technology with a third party live-captioning service—which was unlike anything the industry or its customers had seen before.
Although it hasn’t yet won awards since its release in 2011, CaptionCall quickly became America’s leading captioned phone and communication service for America’s hard-of-hearing community. It rebelled against the notion that assistive devices needed to be bulky, clumsy eyesores and helped make phone conversations accessible to those with hearing loss—which was a form of communication they desired to have but avoided due to the awkwardness, embarrassment, and frustration they often experienced.
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