About me

I have ADHD, and at some point I realized I’d been doing UX design on myself for years without calling it that.

A lot of my free time goes into building systems that work with my brain instead of against it: gamifying exercise and personal finance with board games and gem-based rewards, breaking tasks down to cut overwhelm, organizing my space to kickstart habits and keep them alive. Every time, it’s the same loop: introspect, observe my own behavior like a researcher would, sketch a low-fi fix, prototype it, live with it, assess what changed, reflect on goals, repeat. That’s design thinking. I just learned it on myself before I learned it from a textbook.

I recognize my own instincts in Jakob Nielsen’s usability heuristics. Recognition rather than recall is why I build external systems instead of trusting a memory I know is unreliable. Aesthetic and minimalist design is why I strip my habit systems down to the few things that move the needle. Flexibility and efficiency of use is why I build tools around how my specific brain works instead of borrowing someone else’s system wholesale. The heuristics were written for software. I’d been applying them to my own life first.

That’s the through-line in everything I design: reduce cognitive load, make processes intuitive for different kinds of brains, make achievement feel motivating, and never lose sight of the goal.