Strategies & Experiences for Human Problems
Why Context Matters
Organizations often solve the wrong problem. They respond to symptoms, optimize isolated touch points, or apply technology without understanding how people actually behave.
That leads to services that are difficult to use, environments that work against people, and systems that create friction instead of removing it.
What I Do
I help teams turn an understanding of human behavior into clear strategies, services, and environments that work in the real world.
The work connects what people do with what gets built—aligning product, operations, and experience so solutions hold up under real conditions.
Outcomes
Across environments, the work produces:
- Clear direction on what to solve and what not to
- Service and system concepts grounded in real behavior
- Alignment between product, operations, and environment
- Reduced friction, waste, and workarounds
These outcomes show up in better experiences, more efficient operations, and solutions that perform outside of ideal conditions.
Examples
Diabetes Coaching & Decision Support Systems
The Problem
People living with diabetes—especially those with highly variable or poorly controlled blood sugar—often face multiple real-world barriers that make it difficult to consistently follow a treatment plan.
Even when guidance exists, day-to-day factors like lifestyle complexity, competing demands, and inconsistent routines make adherence difficult and outcomes unstable.
As a result, clinical recommendations and lived reality often diverge.
My Approach
Worked with nurses and behavioral scientists to understand what an effective treatment plan looks like in practice, and how clinical intent is structured to achieve efficacy.
Studied how people with diabetes monitor blood sugar, interpret readings, and attempt to apply guidance in the context of their daily lives.
Identified where treatment plans, clinical intent, and lived behavior break down in practice.
Portions of the treatment planning structure were then translated into the UX of a digital coaching experience, embedding parts of the care logic into the interface so it could be used more directly in real-world decision-making.
Methodologies
- Behavioral Research
- Jobs to Be Done
- Service Blueprinting & Design
- Co-Creation Workshops
- Digital Service Design
- Product Design
- In-Depth Interviews
- Journey Mapping
- Research Synthesis
- Insights Development
Key Insights
Clinical decisions rely on incomplete patient-reported data, creating a gap between lived behavior and what gets discussed in care settings.
Care plans are updated too infrequently to reflect the day-to-day variability of diabetes in real life.
What we uncovered
Clinical treatment plans are typically updated only a few times a year, which means the guidance often lags behind the day-to-day variability of a person’s condition and lived experience managing diabetes. Between visits, people are expected to self-manage within this gap, even as their needs and circumstances shift more frequently than the care plan changes.
At the same time, clinical decision-making depends heavily on patient-reported information during infrequent appointments. These conversations are necessarily compressed and incomplete—patients may forget details, simplify what happened, or not surface relevant day-to-day context—resulting in a partial view of actual behavior.
Why this matters for decisions
This reframes the problem from improving information collection to improving how care plans stay aligned with real-world behavior between clinical visits.
Instead of relying on episodic updates and self-reported summaries, there is an opportunity to design systems that better reflect day-to-day variation and make relevant parts of clinical intent usable in context.
Strategic outcomes
This work informed the design of a coaching system that connects clinical intent, patient behavior, and ongoing glucose data—helping translate structured treatment guidance into something more usable in daily life between care visits.
Making Generic Medical Devices Usable for Kids
Problem
Medical devices and instructions for use were designed as universal tools, but in practice were being used in pediatric contexts where dosage, comprehension needs, and caregiver responsibility are very different. This created a mismatch between how the system was designed and how it was actually used.
Approach
Studied how caregivers and clinicians interact with instructions and dosing guidance in real-world pediatric use scenarios, identifying where standard IFUs and device design created confusion or risk in practice.
Interventions
- Universal IFU design breaks in specialized contexts (like pediatric use)
- Real-world use requires caregivers to interpret and apply dosing and usage instructions under time pressure, often without direct clinical support.
- Static IFU formats fail to adapt to situational variability, increasing reliance on memory, interpretation, or guesswork.
Impact
Reframed instructions as digital, context-aware guidance that could better support caregiver-led use in pediatric environments, surfacing critical information at the point of need rather than in static documentation.
Outcomes
Improved accessibility and usability of critical device and dosing information in pediatric contexts, reducing reliance on static IFUs and supporting more reliable real-world use.
Future State Home Buying Experience
Problem
Buying a home is not a single transaction. It is a long, multi-step system involving buyers, lenders, brokers, and regulators. Most experiences treat it as a linear process, which leads to fragmented decisions, unclear ownership across steps, and a lack of cohesion across the journey. As a result, people often struggle to understand where they are in the process, what comes next, and how each decision impacts the outcome.
Approach
Developed a future-state vision for the home buying experience by mapping the end-to-end journey across stakeholders and identifying where coordination breaks down between customer intent, operational constraints, and service delivery. The work focused on reframing the experience as a connected system rather than isolated steps, and translating that into potential service models that could be explored with teams across the ecosystem.
Key Insights
- The home buying journey is a coordination problem, not a navigation problem. Buyers, lenders, and agents operate with partial visibility, which creates duplicated effort, inconsistent expectations, and friction at key decision points.
- Lorem
Strategic Direction
The opportunity is to design the home buying experience as a coordinated service ecosystem, where information, actions, and responsibilities are visible across stakeholders. This reframes the challenge from “helping individuals complete steps faster” to “reducing fragmentation across the system so decisions can be made with confidence.”
This shift has implications for how lenders structure digital experiences, how agents support buyers, and how information flows across the lifecycle of a home purchase.
IoT for Contact Lens Inventory & Dispensing
Problem
Eye care environments relied on manual, fragmented inventory systems to manage contact lenses, creating inefficiencies between clinical prescribing and physical dispensing. Storage and retrieval processes were often disconnected from how clinicians actually made decisions about patient needs.
Approach
Observed clinical workflows in eye care settings, focusing on how prescriptions were made, how inventory was stored and accessed, and where breakdowns occurred between clinical intent and physical fulfillment.
Key Insights
- Inventory systems were not aligned with clinical decision-making, creating friction between what was prescribed and what was readily available.
- Manual storage and retrieval processes increased cognitive and physical load in already time-constrained clinical environments.
- Lack of real-time visibility into inventory contributed to inefficiencies and mismatches in fulfillment.
Intervention
Designed a system to organize and dispense contact lenses that better connected prescribing behavior with inventory visibility and retrieval processes.
Outcome
Reduced operational friction, improved alignment between clinical intent and inventory systems, and increased efficiency in day-to-day dispensing workflows.
Understanding Contexts & Behaviors in Physical Spaces
Designing services and environments that respond to real human needs
Rapid Prototyping to Learn & Prove Value
Designing services and environments that respond to real human needs
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