You know how you take those personality tests
to see if you’re more right or left brained, more artistic or more analytical? I score in the middle every time. Turns out the kid who couldn’t decide if she liked English, art, or science class more…was right.
I grew up in Dorchester, went to high school in Brighton, college in Maine. An itch to learn German grew into a language and literature major, a year at the University of Tübingen, and a post grad job in Berlin. When I came home I bounced around temp jobs and ended up in a wealth management group at Fidelity Investments.
I started with data entry and sales reporting, and “cleaning up” PowerPoints I saw reps and management putting out. Word got around, then all customer- and executive-facing presentations from the team went through me first. I studied graphic design. When the group developed an intranet site they sent me to coding courses. In 1999 I left to join the small internal team working on Fidelity.com.
Over the next 10 years what became Fidelity UXD quadrupled in size and exploded in scope to include multiple digital properties across the enterprise. Within 2 years I was managing a team of designers and writers working on NetBenefits, the site for Fidelity’s institutional retirement and health plan participants. We adapted the large, siloed site to a integrated design system (evangelizing to those silos’ business and tech teams), designed all digital investment transactions, created retirement and health plan enrollment flows, and completely overhauled the site twice (structure and styles).
In 2009 I left to freelance, and worked for a year with a social media startup creating a “Facebook for kids” with facial recognition login and live content moderation. The world of retirement investing wasn’t through with me, and in 2010 I led UX projects for New York Life’s institutional retirement site and internal workstations. A year later I was back at Fidelity full time working on guidance and planning tools.
In 2014 I joined the team directing UX for Fidelity’s global portfolio, and started traveling: to Dublin for a Fidelity Charitable responsive account opening app, to London to support a growing team on the redesign of fidelity.co.uk (see Thinking of England), and to Toronto to interview Fidelity Canada phone teams for a workstation redesign. The following year I managed UX for a series of enterprise applications: an e-communications surveillance tool, a corporate security case management system, and the redesign of both the employee-facing compliance site and the workstation used by all compliance personnel (more here). Sweeping layoffs came in 2017, and I joined TIAA for two years in 2018 as a UX lead for their digital transactions portfolio.
My husband Alfred and I live in Dedham with our dogs Max and Rory, and our cat Munch. It’s been a rough year: we lost our Frenchie Tula in January and our chihuahua Bo in October, both to cancer (hers slow-growing over 3 years, his a sad surprise). A month later we saw Rory’s face on a rescue site and now she’s part of the pack.
Lola (2008-2015) and Tula (2008-2020)
Bo (2011-2020)
Munch
Max
Rory