Equus Software's first UX designer. A 30-day solo discovery, then 18 months of monthly design sprints, replacing scattered emails from six different teams with one system an anxious employee could actually follow.
An assignee moving from Denver to a three-year post in Singapore had to coordinate moving companies, immigration, tax advisors, HR, and their new job — each on a different channel, with no shared thread. One assignee in Taiwan called it "a sea of different emails with no priority."
My job was to turn that chaos into a single guided path: get the assignee to "relocated and functioning" as efficiently as possible, without losing the humans they still needed to talk to along the way.
"I was chosen for this assignment because I was the perfect fit... I'm excited to share this experience with my wife and kids."
Progressive disclosure only works if you know exactly where someone stands in the journey. I mapped Andy's full arc so the product could show him precisely what he needed, and nothing else, at each phase.
The team's early direction was an animated masonry card layout — colorful, delightful on desktop. It broke on mobile: jarring reflow, hard to scan, performance issues on older devices. I proposed an accordion instead, backed by a direct survey question.
The team preferred masonry. I advocated for accordion using the survey data, mobile usage signals ("I want it on my phone"), and accessibility — and it shipped. Professional disagreement, resolved by evidence, is the decision I'm proudest of on this project.
One inbox connecting Global Mobility, vendors, and the assignee — replacing six teams' worth of disconnected email threads with real-time, role-specific updates.
A live bar graph gave HR real-time visibility into actual-vs-budgeted relocation and storage costs, turning assignee conversations from guesswork into evidence.
Housing, schools, banking, and cultural-norms guides targeted to the assignee's specific destination and policy, replacing generic PDFs with answers that mattered to their move.
Recreated for illustration — Equus's actual production UI is proprietary, not shown here.
The 2016–2018 research still holds. Out of curiosity, I rebuilt the core screens using Claude and React to see what the same evidence-backed decisions would look like with today's AI-assisted workflow — what took weeks of custom build then now prototypes in days.
AI accelerated the execution. It didn't replace the research that told us what to build in the first place — that's still the part that ages well.