Hi, I’m Hailey.
I’m driven to understand people and make their lives better, experience by experience.
I’m driven to understand people and make their lives better, experience by experience.
Using the principles of user-centered design thinking, I hope to inform and create intuitive experiences that bring a touch of joy to people’s lives.
My background in cognitive science, focusing in the social science and ethics of human-computer interaction design, has sharpened my mind and eye for strategies and designs both effective and ethical: those that harness the details of the user’s psychology and also truly serve the end user in an ethical way to promote human flourishing.
I believe in the power of strategic experiences, in all their nuances. I hope to help bring bring moments of relief, ease, and delight to the everyday—especially in high-emotion and high-impact moments—and to empower people to make truly meaningful progress in their lives.
I pursue this exploration primarily through articles, essays, and speculative fiction.
I have a few things I’m working on right now… I haven’t published anything here in a while, but hope to have some works out soon! In the meantime, my older work is ready for your perusal.
In 2017 alone, Amazon’s Alexa received over one million marriage proposals. You might imagine that most of these were jokes, you know—Alexa, will you marry me? Ha ha—but you might also agree it’s interesting that we seem far less likely to ask this—even as a joke—of the average dishwasher or calculator. The public lamented for NASA’s Curiosity Rover…
I spent the past month living and working on a farm. I learned so much of what it is to live intentionally, with gratitude, and with a sense of inner calm and contentment: I am so far convinced that it begins with a deeper awareness of all the living things around us and with a realization that life is now.
I am passionate about providing delightful, seamless experiences to the end user that actually bring joy and are actually intuitive. This means that my design process is grounded in empathetic user research all the way through—from initial problem understanding & definition through testing and feedback following implementation. I design to serve real users, and do the work to make sure my designs serve them well.
User testing on low-fidelity (read: Sharpie-on-paper) prototypes in coffee shops has been a key part of some of my projects in receiving feedback from target users early and often—learning what works and what doesn’t, from the user’s perspective, as we ideate and iterate.
Analyzing insights from user interviews through different strategic lenses yields exciting breakthroughs in the discovery of latent needs—implicit problems beyond those users could explicitly complain about—and possible responses to that problem.
I’m so happy you stopped by! If you have any comments, questions, feedback, insights, excellent puns, dad jokes, book or paper recommendations, or ideas you would like to discuss, please reach out! I would love to hear from you.
Two weeks ago, I introduced this series on anthropomorphism. In this post, I aim to describe more about what anthropomorphism is and about our understanding so far of how it works — ft. someone crying in a coffee shop, an old car, and some triangles & a circle.