Product & App Design

I have been the designer on three startups I cofounded. Dio is a nightlife ordering app in TestFlight beta, with a patent-pending system that batches drink orders by complexity. OtterLoon was a professional networking app that never launched. Clairvista Partners is in stealth, so I can only share the design work.

In a timed field study at a partner bar, Dio cut the wait for a drink from roughly 9.5 minutes to about 3. The baseline was timed during live service, and Dio’s flow in an after-hours simulation.

For the Burt Foundation I designed the grant portal’s interface, and we built it alongside the foundation’s public site. That one is B2B: the people using it are the director, the reviewers and the applicant organizations.

For Crescendo, a hearing health app, I interviewed ten users and watched how people actually used their hearing aids. Tech-forward users wanted control. Everyone else wanted it to run itself. So the same product had to work very differently for each, and moderated usability tests with ten users showed where it still did not.

Research scales to the stage you are at. For Crescendo it was interviews and testing with real users. For Dio it was a timed field study in a working bar.

Sometimes the product exists and something is off. On Bay State Holdings’ three sites, the inquiry forms were backwards. The low-price brand made people upload a photo before they could ask a question, and the high-price one asked nothing about the job.

So I mapped each company’s customer journey and rebuilt the forms around it. An audit ends with what to fix first and why, not a list of everything that could be better.