The hard part

isn't making something.

is making the right something.

I cut through ambiguity using research and design.

Less guessing, dart throwing, and iterating. More listening, learning, and nailing it.

Expertise

Know where to spend your energy.

I help senior leadership teams understand what will make an impact, and I lead teams who make experiences that really help people.

My specialty is applying Human-Centered Design, Ethnographic Research, and Rapid Prototyping techniques in order to:

Clear away ambiguity and understand human decisions and behaviors
Turn messy data into evidence-backed strategies
Ensure what gets made holds up in the real world

This solves the problems people experience in any environment or context. The results can be physical, digital, or experiential, but they must adapt to the contexts and environments of the people who use them.

Experience highlights

Approach

Don't solve assumptions.

Before figuring out how to make something, I figure out what to make. I use these frameworks to understand what will create value for the people who use them, building brand affinity, loyalty, and trust.

Desirability / Feasibility / Viability

We balance these aspects of an experience to avoid expensive changes downstream.

Desirability asks if people will benefit, and why.
Feasibility asks if it can be made with what's available.
Viability asks if it will make economic sense.

Start with desirability to make sure people actually care about what we are solving.

Jobs to Be Done & Journey Mapping

Innovation comes from figuring out what someone needs done, not asking what they want.

JTBD helps uncover why people do or don't do something. Understanding what is driving behavior and layering this over the emotional experience people go through when trying to solve their problem shows us where things break down and where there's real opportunity.

Design Thinking & Service Design

Design Thinking is a method of moving from an unclear problem to something testable. Service Design expands that approach beyond individual products and services to the full experience: channels, people, environments, procedures, and systems.

Together, they help make sense of what's happening and what a better experience could look like.

automation

How AI shows up in my practice

I have designed UX for AI, used it for Human-in-the-Loop research and process management, and crafted best practices and ethical guidelines for using AI in services and products.

AI as the engine

Machine Learning to drive behavioral interventions in digital therapeutics
Computer Vision for rapid analysis of inventory in surgical settings
LLMs and Natural Language Processing for customer service in venues

AI as an engineering partner

Functional prototypes for testing surface real needs faster
Animations and digital maquettes to communicate design intent to engineers
POCs to increase confidence before investments are made

In research & synthesis

Filtering through dense information like survey data
Pattern recognition in large or disparate datasets
Translation of foreign-language research or interviews

Work

Bring clarity to complex problems. Create experiences with value.

Here are three contrasting examples showing how my approach can be applied to different contexts.

Major League Baseball · Venue Commerce · 2025

Changing how a sport thinks about the fan experience.

MLB's In-Venue Product team wanted to understand why fans spend money the way they do at the ballpark. The working assumption was that the food and beverage experience was the place to invest — but they weren't certain, and didn't know what to do about it.

Across four ballparks and hundreds of fan conversations, we reframed the question in a way that shifted how all 30 teams think about the concourse experience.

Johnson & Johnson · App-Based Behavior Change · 2016

From patient living rooms to clinical trials.

Three teams were working toward different goals — marketing wanted an avatar-based app, the clinical team was skeptical, and IT had a mandate to ship AI within a year.

Two products advanced to clinical trial. The key: reframing the work around what patients can actually sustain, not what clinicians expect them to do.

Irminsul · AI-Driven Gaming Guide · 2026

Making a complex game easier through vibe coding.

Genshin Impact has five million active players a day and some of the richest lore and gameplay available. It's also genuinely too complicated for most people to keep up with.

Using my kids as research subjects and AI as an engineering partner, I took the project from problem identification to a live Beta — without losing the thread of what the experience should actually do for a person.

About

Take things apart to make them better.

I have worked in digital design since 1998 and in experience strategy since 2012, but I have been taking things apart to understand how they work (and how they could be better) my whole life.

I'm drawn to the mechanics of things. Although I went to school for fine arts, I consider myself more of a mechanic than an artist. I get intrinsic value out of fixing things, whether it's a house, a car, a customer experience, or my dog's bad habits.

I have too many hobbies: my daughters and I train at a local archery academy, I'm deep into my third car restoration (a 1973 Datsun 240z, and in more detail here) and run a club for car enthusiastsa>. I collect vinyl records, guitars, and vintage hi-fi gear.

I live in lived in Maplewood, NJ, with my family, three cats, and my Scotch Collie, Phoebe.

Contact

If you're working on something hard, let's talk!

If understanding people is treated as a real input to strategy, not an afterthought, and decisions are shaped by that understanding, we should talk.

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Based in Maplewood, NJ · Currently available for full-time or consulting roles at the Senior Director to VP level · New York metro or remote