My career didn't start in marketing, and it definitely didn't start in analytics dashboards. It started with plain web design — building pages, picking fonts, making things look right. Everything since has been an expansion of that same original question: what makes someone actually want to use this?
1. Web design first
I came up building websites the traditional way — layout, typography, color, hierarchy. That foundation still shows up in everything I do now, including the sites in my portfolio, and in how I think about using AI design tools today — the fundamentals don't change just because the tools did. But the longer I designed pages, the more I found myself asking questions design alone couldn't answer: why does one layout convert and a nearly identical one doesn't?
2. Moving into UX and interaction design
That question pulled me into UX. I spent a stretch of my career deep in interaction design specifically — the mechanics of how a click, a hover state, a transition, or a form field's behavior shapes whether someone completes a task or abandons it. Interaction design taught me to treat every small interactive moment as a decision point, not decoration.
3. Testing designs and running user studies
From there, I moved into formal usability testing and user studies — actually watching people use what I'd built, instead of assuming my own instincts were correct. This is the stage that changed how I work more than any other: a design that looks obviously right on my screen can still fail the moment a real person tries to use it, and the only way to know is to test it. It's also where I learned that testing has to include accessibility, not just general usability — a design that "works" for most people but fails for someone using a screen reader hasn't actually been tested.
4. Now: lead conversion and the marketing side of user behavior
Today, at Pearson, that same thread — how real behavior differs from assumed behavior — is what I apply to CRO and paid-media landing pages. I'm the SME on my team for GA4, Looker Studio, and Salesforce, and I lead the testing strategy behind 50+ landing pages (see the full case study). It's the same discipline as usability testing, just measured in conversion rate instead of task completion — the questions "did this work?" and "how do we know?" never really changed, only the tools I use to answer them.