Meet Diane
Southern California girl born and raised. Designer, UX course creator, and chai tea drinker.
Loves: Salty ocean breezes, warm sun, and mid century everything.
I wasn't always a design expert, and didn't always work at top-tier companies, or teach UX design courses...
After graduating college with a degree in Psychology, I was lost.
I didn’t want to pursue Psychology any further.
I wanted to try something different, and I thought maybe I could be a Librarian.
Turns out, I didn’t make a good librarian. In fact, it was a terrible career match for me. But, I discovered that I loved organizing information, and this was the spark I needed. I continued on to learn more about Interaction design, and set out to be a UX designer creating a portfolio and attending conferences to meet people in the field.
You can hear more of my story in the video below.
Tap the play icon to play the video
I’m super passionate about design, teaching design, crafting design, and design leadership.
I dream about design in my sleep, and I’m obsessive about making sure design is scalable, functional, elegant and beautiful. I’m on a personal mission to ensure designers and organizations understand what design leadership looks like in practice- at any level.
Design is much harder than it looks.
When you first enter the UX design field, you might think it’s fun. And it is! But, after awhile you start to realize it’s much more complex than you thought, and there’s much more under the surface than you first understood.
Don’t worry, this is totally normal. Design looks easy, but with more experience, you realize there’s much more to learn. I’m here to help. I’ve gone through the hard parts of learning design and I will be your guide and your secret weapon.
My career, strengths and what I bring to your learning experience.
I’m known for being a well-rounded designer, a strong communicator, and for influencing product strategy through design and collaboration.
My expertise is crafting pragmatic strategy with delightful experience, and creating multi-year roadmaps.
I’ve worked on a range of projects from native mobile apps, social media, HR tech, fintech, advertising platforms, gaming, and e-commerce. Across both enterprise and consumer.
Why I teach UX courses
Early in my career, I made mistakes and received feedback from better designers. I spent numerous hours perfecting my designs, working at top companies. I want to help others by sharing my experiences. My learning the hard way, will make your life easier and you can avoid the mistakes I made.
My teaching philosophy
Design has a lot of abstract concepts, and if you didn't learn a certain way-some of concepts might be difficult to understand.
My goal is to simplify the content into easy to understand using pragmatic examples.
I don't believe in "watering down" content, I just make the content more accessible.
Teacher and mentor
I teach design on LinkedIn Learning, and actively mentor newcomers in the UX field to land their first UX designer job, including career changers.
I also mentor senior level designers looking to uplevel skills in advanced ux and design leadership to lead design projects and initiatives.
Recent speaking engagements
Talk UX 2022
In more senior roles, you’ll be called upon to weigh on strategy discussions, and in some cases, drive business and product decisions through design.
While design managers do some of this work, it’s not uncommon for IC leads to contribute to defining product strategy.
This talk outlines key components in defining product strategy as a designer.
More about me...
My favorite things
Retro signs, vintage typography in the wild, architecture and roadside Americana are just some of my interests.
What's on my desk (and can't design without)
