Hello!

Rockin’1000 is a small but mighty company from Italy bringing musicians together to live their dreams: playing a stadium show with a mega-band of 1000 members from all walks of life. While they specialize in live events, they developed a mobile app for their community to stay connected and organize the shows.

My business partner and I started with a redesign of the app onboarding, with the goal of reducing early churn. The work quickly expanded into something larger: we tackled all aspects of product activation, from defining the right metrics to collect, to restructuring transactional and marketing emails, to laying the foundations for a new design system library aligned with their recent rebranding.

The iOS Lead Engineer at Tubi reached out to me for a self-initiated project: she had a strong conviction that the mobile experience needed work, and a green light from Product to go ahead and come up with proposals. Together we also found, and claimed, a parked ticket for increasing the visibility and discoverability of TV Series. We brought the two goals together into one project, giving the iOS and Android teams an opportunity to better sync on experiments and feature releases.

My approach to this revamp is one I like and cheer for whenever I can: look at the big picture holistically, but break the design down into individual tests to build a roadmap, rather than shipping one sweeping change that’s difficult to measure. The challenge, and what I find most valuable about this method, is making sure the long-term vision holds regardless of the outcome of any individual experiment it’s made of.

What do you get if you put together a giant streaming catalog of 50k+ titles, with many obscure or forgotten flicks from a vintage era, generic content carousels with no curation, and machine learning recommendations steered in unpredictable directions by power users? The answer: a very confusing discovery experience for new users.

This was a known problem at Tubi. Our user research showed that even if we couldn’t rely on the buzz and word of mouth generated by new Netflix or HBO titles, we had other tools at hand. There were signals we were ignoring, characteristics our audience could use to choose something to watch, that could guide users and generate trust.

From these thoughts came the idea to build a framework for grouping content into containers (the carousel rows we scroll through on the TV or phone app) in a way that more closely matched the mindset of the user deciding what to watch. This is a more heady, “philosophical” exercise of content design I strategized on and developed with Maureen Bee, Lead UX Researcher.

If I had to pick one reason I chose to be a designer, I’d say it’s to never be bored, and designing for an environment I haven’t yet designed for is the perfect antidote to boredom. At Tubi I had the chance to pick up new skills, experiencing both curiosity and frustration working on OTT.

Human/device interactions on TVs are somehow the polar opposite of mobile: where touch interfaces make our actions quick and less conscious, using a remote intrinsically carries a level of clunkiness that sits right between the user and what they want to achieve. When it comes to speccing, TV has its own set of complications, from the big divide between Roku and the rest of the HTML5-based platforms, to the fact that remotes come in different forms with different buttons. Here are a few mocks from my OTT designs.

“Design is a blocker.” That’s what the Lead Mobile Engineer told me right after I joined MasterClass. My Design Manager explained that the Growth team was at capacity and we needed a solid vision for the apps’ onboarding, one that could unfold into a progression of experiments. Oh! They wanted that vision ready in two weeks. Thankfully I had solid growth and onboarding experience to draw from.

My final concept brought together three elements: a compelling story to present what members got access to and convince users to subscribe; short videos to drop prospective members immediately into learning mode; and a modular approach to the narrative units composing the onboarding itself, allowing us to quickly test and measure conversion, keep the onboarding story cohesive, and have a chain of alternatives lined up for experimentation.

At the time I joined the team, a new Product Manager was taking the lead on rebuilding MasterClass’ SEO strategy, moving away from the simplistic approach of publishing as many Articles as possible. Loosely connected to the platform’s offering, all Articles shared one template with a brief text randomly interrupted by promos and CTAs trying to divert readers’ attention toward the subscription.

The Product Manager wanted stronger alignment with both the brand and the audience. He kicked things off with Instructor Pages, a new format of SEO articles telling the compelling stories of MasterClass’ popular instructors, with the goal of ranking high on SERPs and drawing higher-intent traffic. My task was to design a new template where immersive reading would organically lead into conversion, with the possibility of reusing and adapting the new layout and components to retrofit the older Articles.

This was the last project I worked on at Scribd, and a very interesting one for a bookworm and series reader like me. Building on the design system components and visual choices from my previous project, the Category Pages redesign, I put together an experience aimed at being the best one could find on the web.

Most series readers fall in love with characters and world-building, and look at the plot as a way to get deeper into both. But Wikipedia tends to be their only friend, often the only reliable place to track all the titles in a series and their correct order. My designs for Scribd’s Series Page had the potential to be just as informative and exhaustive, while putting forward an offer hard to resist: subscribe, and you can read all of these titles in one place.

This is one of those quick requests that can drop at any designer’s desk. A senior designer was moving into a manager position and asked me to explore visual design variants and interactions for a winning experiment that needed to be productized.

The original design was a quick view panel for getting more information about a Title (book, audiobook, document, and so on), letting users better pick content without leaving the page they were on. We ended up choosing the safest route, building a component very close to the original designs. That said, I quite like some of my experiments, and I think they show how I approach interaction design and motion.

When I was the lead designer of their SEO team, Scribd was still something like a hydra with two heads. Born as a place for uploading and sharing PDFs, it expanded into a book and audiobook subscription service, adding a Premium catalog of titles that became the core of the business model. But the overflowing volume of user-generated documents that made their SEO strategy so effective also meant Google didn’t recognize Scribd as a place for book readers.

The SEO Product Manager set things in motion by redesigning key landing pages of the Premium book catalog. My first task was to redesign the Category Pages to capture readers’ attention and drive them to the Title Page, the highest-converting surface we had. It was a long and articulated project, and I laid out some ambitious goals: designing a modular layout structure that would allow for future experimentation; creating a content flow that would keep visitors engaged with the page as long as possible; and expanding our newly born design system with components that could benefit the site at large.

Design-for-good initiatives don’t always get the resources that commercial ideas do, but the impact they have on individuals and communities is real, and the passion that drives non-profits is exceptional. Founded by Hera Hussain, Chayn is one of these organizations, developing digital experiences for victims of domestic and gender-based violence. During the pandemic I signed up as a volunteer at Chayn and quickly got moved to design, as I was the only one with those skills.

Over the course of a couple of years I learned a lot and passed on as much Figma knowledge as I could, to empower the team to design on their own. Now offline, Your Story Matters was one of the projects I contributed to, working on everything from information architecture to design system components. Because it doesn’t exist anymore, I took some time to clean up and rework my designs, to show you how I work independently outside a commercial setting.

A few days into my new role at Scribd, I jumped on the Hack Week wagon and joined a team with an idea that needed a designer: turning book highlights into a feed. Recently I took those early sketches and gave them more thought and time, to see what a more mature prototype could look like. If you’re into books, you know social media has its bookworm corners of influencers curating pages and recommending titles, but there isn’t anything yet uniquely dedicated to books. Scribd (now Everand) didn’t develop the idea further, but I‘m still fascinated by its potential.

With increased competition from pre-installed note apps, Evernote took the activation challenge very seriously. At the time I joined the Growth Design team, experiments had corroborated the hypothesis of personalization as a lever for onboarding engagement. I contributed to the design of a Web client test, an effort leading to a 17% activation lift. After that, I took over the lead role, bringing personalization to the apps’ onboarding.

The stakes on mobile were higher. It drove the majority of acquisition traffic but offered less real estate, the feature set was different, and app users’ attention is shorter, giving us just a handful of seconds to make a lasting impression.

I deliberately softened the first part of the onboarding to guide users to create their first note without pressure. The experience is brief and drops users in front of features relevant to the use case they chose, rather than asking them to explore every knob of Evernote’s editor to figure out what it could do for them, as the old flow did.

A Head of Growth, two Product Managers, three Designers, a Design Manager, and two dedicated Engineering teams with a Lead each. Meet Evernote’s GET, the Growth Experiments Team. As a first-time Growth Designer, this was the most supportive environment I could have asked for. I learned a lot from the divide-and-conquer approach practiced by the designers, relying on their expertise and an invaluable, detailed, searchable archive of fully documented experiments. Here’s a taste of the work I did there. Happy to chat more about it!