Solving Problems at the Point of Creation
I began my career as a licensed Speech-Language Pathologist, fixing communication at the point of failure. In fast-paced healthcare and neuro-rehabilitation settings, I was often the sole clinical lead, diagnosing cognitive barriers and building real-world workarounds for patients recovering from strokes, living with neurodegenerative diseases, or managing neurological impairments after traumatic brain injuries.
Much of that work involved training patients on complex AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) devices and helping them program those systems around their own lives. It put me face-to-face with a hard reality: everyday digital infrastructure is rarely built for human variance.
In functional rehabilitation sessions, I sat bedside and watched brilliant people struggle with basic, essential tasks: navigating an online banking app, ordering groceries, paying an e-bill, or trying to buy a plane ticket to see family for the holidays. A significant part of my job was counseling them through frustrations they had never encountered before. These weren’t accessibility failures I was simply reading about in a textbook; I watched these design barriers block a person’s independence in real time.
Rehabilitation changes the patient, but inclusive design changes the world the patient has to live in. I wanted to focus on the latter: to resolve systemic friction before it ever reaches a user’s hands.
To bridge my clinical science background with digital product design, I earned the Google UI/UX Design Professional Certificate. Today, I apply what I know about cognitive load, motor-control limitations, and physiological vision changes directly to digital interfaces. I also bring a clinical understanding of how language is processed and understood across the human lifespan to the UX copy on the page. My goal is simple: anyone should be able to independently meet their own needs.