giving new ideas their first forms
I'm a designer, writer, and community builder based in Brooklyn, NY.
I started my career helping Fortune 500 companies ideate and prototype new products. I then went in-house, working at NYT Cooking to build a CMS for food editors, refresh the homepage, and create the step-by-step recipes format. Currently, I work inside The Times' Publishing group, where I design tools for the newsroom.
Outside of that, I’m working on a newsletter called Ongoing Works, about the habits, practices, and ways-of-working that goes into making interesting work.
Explore some of my work below. Inquire for more detailed case studies.
2024 —
designing tools for the times' newsroom
In 2024, I joined the Publishing team at The Times which was already engaged in a multi-year project to reimagine the full suite of journalistic tools at The Times. I was tasked with refining the first feature that would be shipped to the newsroom, the Global Navigation.
The new global navigation shipped with a brand new dashboard, where editors and writers can see what they've been working on.
Custom icons we're created for marquee editorial tools for the global nav, in collaboration with a freelancer and The Times Brand team.
In the past, an test article (about watermelons on Mars, lol) got published by mistake on The Times' website. Leadership wanted the global nav to let people know (big time) of which code environment they were in, so I created a few more variations.
I joined as part of a team called Starter Kit, which is tasked with basically building an out-of-the-box CMS, a series of building blocks that any of The Times newsrooms (including Cooking, Wirecutter, Games, and The Athletic) can create their own customized CMSes for all their editorial needs.
The work envolves building a lot of foundational features that are easy at first glance but complicated behind the scenes, like deleting and unpublishing.
Much of this work involves really understanding the engineering behind the scenes, how these tools work so the actions are clearly communicated to the users in easy-to-understand ways, especially when your users are on a deadline. One of the concepts I needed to wrap my head around was "referential entities" or what happens when someone tries to unpublish something that's part of another published article. Communicating those intricacies requires making detailed specs to shares simple to follow UIs that streamline the complicated concepts on the backend.
I've also been involved in making other foundational features, like an activity log, so journalists and editors can see who made what changes, to different parts of an article.
Another foundational feature is the entity picker, the ability to add different assets to any article, helping users quickly browse the massive archive of photos and other content types.
Lastly, I helped build a suite of avatars, a foundational component to unlocking collaborative editing across every tool leveraging the Starter Kit platform.
2021—2024
designing products for food editors and home cooks
I was brought into NYT Cooking as the first designer to build a custom CMS for food editors. I was the first person on the team. I conducted the research, talking to food editors in Cooking and technologists across The Times working on other CMS. I sketched out the information hierarchy for this new piece of software and then focused in on the first launch, Easy Bake, which would be a power tool for building collections of recipes
The collections editor was made to make it simple for editors to search Cooking's full database of recipes and quickly add.
The collections editor needing to make it easy for users to edit and refine the metadata, ensuring recipe collections come up in Google searches, one of the leading ways for users to find NYT Cooking's content.
Initially this product had a limited engineering team and we needed to compare and contrast different interactions for more time consuming features (like drag and drop), finding the sweet spot of intuitive and quick to user while being speedy to ship. Assets like the one below helped me sketch out different interactions and compare them to one another, collaboratively deciding with the team the best approach to build.
Later, I moved onto the reading facing website. One of the new formats I shipped was step-by-step recipes. A lot of other websites already had this format, yet we had to find a way to add additional content to NYT Cooking's minimalist recipe pages in a way that helped readers decide what to cook rather than have them feeling overwhelmed by the amount of content on the page.
To make it easy for readers to get a better sense of steps, we ensured that whenever they expanded a step's visual, the step's instructions came with it, so home cooks can get a better understanding through both food and words.
I wanted to make it easy for mobile users to browse step and visuals easily. I created a few experimental interactions, yet they all proved to be too complex for basic browsing.
The final mobile layout was simpler, with steps trailing recipe instructions.
Though the final layouts were simple, they were all informed from user research, understanding how people browse recipes and decided what to cook. Three tests were created to get detailed sense of what formats users really want.
