I'm Melanie, a product designer who likes solving the whole problem—not just the screen in front of me. My work spans the full product experience, from unboxing and setting up hardware to designing complex workflows, systems, and the smallest interaction details. I’m driven by curiosity about how people understand the world, where friction comes from, and how thoughtful design can make complicated things feel surprisingly simple.

Before design, I studied human behavior from a different angle. I was a researcher and educator at the University of Chicago, working in Cultural Psychiatry and teaching Professional Writing in the Humanities. My academic background spans psychology, philosophy, culture, and cognition, and it still shapes the way I approach product problems today: look closely, question assumptions, understand the broader system, and communicate clearly.

Growing up as the daughter of immigrants—and now raising a child of my own—has made me especially aware of how differently people can experience the same environment. Motherhood has only deepened that perspective. It has made me more observant, more pragmatic, and even more interested in designing technology that works with the realities of human attention, behavior, and everyday life.

Design is where all of those threads come together for me: human behavior, systems thinking, communication, and creative problem solving. I believe technology should support our cognitive strengths rather than compete with them, and I’m most energized by problems that require me to zoom out, find the underlying pattern, and then carry an idea all the way through to the details that make it work.

I first found UX through my stepfather, who worked in the field, but I’ve since made the discipline very much my own. I’m happiest somewhere between big-picture product thinking and hands-on execution—untangling something complicated, building the structure behind it, and making the final experience feel obvious.

When I’m not designing, I’m usually spending time with my family or getting far too invested in a strategy game—another place where systems, people, and a little creative problem solving tend to collide.

(And don’t come at me for the em dashes—I’ve been using them correctly since long before AI existed. 😉)