Open role working on RMX (Rich Media Experiences) at Zillow. Emphasis on emergent tech, automation-powered experiences and spatial design. This is a strategic and hands-on role. zillow.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Zillow...

I hadn’t run a design sprint in person for awhile. It’s easier on Zoom. In person it’s like cat herding, especially when there are multiple groups working on separate problems.

I know the Rapture is over but for those who are wondering why they didn’t get picked up, you can call this hotline. #rapture

A lot of people ask me what my process is working on next gen experiences. It’s simple. - Co-create w/engs on as many divergent working ideas as possible w/the focus on designing proofs & testing concepts against each other. - Create menu to load different sets of data & config settings - Iterate

My brother used Nano-Banana to optimize an old photo of my dad, and the optimization is a whole different person.

Contributed to a presentation for our upcoming team retreat and there’s a slide for what’s coming. The last bullet said, “Let Ha cook!” That’s a lot of pressure.

I looked up the dwell time on certain features and it gave me a perspective on engagement and efficiency at different parts of the funnel.

I know some people who don’t interview well but would do great in a job.

On the design side, working on experiences that didn’t previously exist is hard even on the visual design side, bc you have to decide what do you want it to evoke. What do you want it to remind you of? Design patterns are built for 2D page experiences.

I find that leading initiatives broadly across the org often gives you the visibility & creds. But leading innovation deeply is often perceived as a black box. No one truly understands it except the team members who are intimately involved with the problem, and it looks easy when you present it.

There’s a difference between being given a set of constraints downstream to design vs creating a new vision by poking at the tech and defining the constraints based on the strength & weakness of the emergent tech. That is Design-led or Experience-led — which can be led by any cross functional role.

Building automation from scratch is a platform effort. On the backend, it’s not just about adding endpoints or adjusting logic—it’s about orchestration, data pipelines, workflow engines & resilience. That’s a different class of work than shipping a feature with a UI and a few backend tweaks.

Everything to me is just a puzzle. After you solve a lot of puzzles, they all start to look the same. You start to see patterns, and there’s always a moment where you say, “Oh I’ve been here before” or “Oh this looks like that other thing but bigger.”

“What percentage AI are you?” This was a question posed by a monk yesterday at a zen monastery. It felt like a koan. What she meant was how much of us is conditioned by algorithm vs mindful living, fresh awareness.

Once you use conversation as the paradigm, then wayfinding & navigation is mute. The data models of customer & domain context is the IP — and how you use the persistent memory to extend that context is the puzzle. The UX has always been in the data & user behaviors to extract the value.

Something I never understood is how can people still be critical thinkers and still believe in god. I sincerely never understood that. Critical thinking requires deconstructing every position. My husband is a scientist and he believes in God. I’ve never asked him what his definition of God is.

Was working w/an engineer on a prototype for a next gen experience, and he said there’s parts of the experience that is not currently feasible. I said that our goal is provocation. We need to let people experience what can be then debate on possibilities & feasibility.

Relating to people doesn’t come naturally for me. I have to continually work on it. At times it feels like a handicap. It takes time for me to build relationships. When I’m mentally spent, I just can’t do all the team activities.

It’s weird now that everybody openly talks about their therapists now. There’s almost a reverse stigma if you don’t have a therapist, like what the hell is wrong with you? Aren’t you working on yourself?

There is survival and then there is hunger. Sometimes they feel the same. When you’re hungry you kinda put yourself in impossible situations where you have to tread water.

I actually think it’s much harder now to work in tech. It used to be that you learn a set of skills and you can rely on it for awhile. But now the adaptation cycles are much faster & shorter, not just hard skills but figuring out how to shift operationally. Leaders have to manage change continually.

There’s a difference in the ambiguity of the value, the how, and the what. They each impact each other but operate on different principles.

Seriously wondering how the people who were all in on the Rapture thing are doing? Do they just move the goal post? What happens when the thing that you’ve based your life’s purpose and identify doesn’t deliver? I have so many questions.

My beginnings are humble and my journey doesn’t look like most people’s. So there are moments when I walk into a room full of brilliant people, I ask myself, “How did I get here?” It is not a lack of confidence, but a recognition of the journey. By sheer odds, I shouldn’t be here.

So I’m hearing that the Rapture is happening tomorrow. I personally feel like I’m not missing out. I’m good. Y’all have fun!

I don’t know how others feel about traveling for work but generally I enjoy it if it’s in a walkable city. I like to spend some time walking the city alone and eating dinner alone. It’s great to catch up with team mates but I always fly in early so that I get that first day alone.

Had to write a job description recently. It occurred to me that Service Design for products with automation has different wrinkles. The inputs maybe machine-generated, user-triggered, or multi-modal. The outputs maybe probabilistic and human intervention is tied to data integrity & product quality.

On my way to Seattle today. I hadn’t traveled for awhile ever since my dad’s last few months in hospice. It feels like I’m putting myself back out in the world again. We are entirely remote, so these retreats are necessary to reconnect.

Something I appreciate at Zillow is that we balance automation with Human-in-the-loop. It enables us to control quality in automation. At the same time, it provides data to improve & scale automation. In this way, the operations and infrastructure of building products look different.

Maybe I’m too jaded, but I can’t muster the enthusiasm for Design events and conferences anymore. The networking thing feels tedious. Perhaps it’s bc my identity isn’t tied to my job. It’s a puzzle I’m solving, granted some puzzles are fun to solve. But it’s not a calling.

When people talk about strategy or working across the org, the hidden skill is reasoning — the ability think through opposing positions. Reasoning develops organically until a narrative takes shape. And every narrative carries with it what we hold to be true, along with the proofs that support it.

Saw this article about how 2 features I worked on impacts stock price. simplywall.st/stocks/us/re...

Years ago I worked with a superb UX agency. I was leading this work as an internal person, and during a meeting w/eng where engineers were going down a rathole of trade offs, one of the designers said, “What assumption do you want us to lead with?” That kept us moving ahead to drive clarity.

I tend to struggle when I lack conviction. I can’t muster motivation when I can’t see the point.

We tend to celebrate successes, not failures, and by failure, I mean learning. Some learning save the company from investing in a huge mistake. The insight should be acknowledged and in some cases even celebrated.

The real risk of AI is that it makes people lazier and dumber. Learning requires some struggle. Forming your own POV requires tension, something that challenges your world view. How many of the new generation actually read books from cover to cover as a hobby.

Fuller list of my principles here: www.linkedin.com/posts/hpuxix...

I tend to think of focus as energy allocation. Sometimes it’s enough to starve things that you think are dumb ideas. Let it die a slow death.

In designing proofs, we ask ourselves, “What is it that we need to prove first?” When we ask that, we strip away all the rest and we can narrow a knowable scope that is foundational for the next thing. We build the first Lego block that informs other connections.

Some principles I follow: - The paradox of choice — more options create cognitive load & complexity. - Don’t give users a rope to hang themselves — freedom without guardrails. - Encourage good behavior/never reward poor behavior. - Naming something gives it meaning, and meaning sets boundaries.

When you work on automation, all the rules around how you might ideate and test change.

The thing you get from working on a large platform vs agency is that agencies don’t have to deal with operations and infrastructure. A lot of frameworks teach you thinking and testing models but they don’t teach you how to influence to augment and evolve sprawling systems.

Many real innovations don’t just layer on top of existing systems; they demand new infrastructure to be viable. They also require new data models to enable this new way of seeing, the new mental model. So the DNA of UX is woven across systems.

Saw this post on LI about building credibility in UX. IMO, it’s about consistency, leading, and mastery. Credibility is about confidence and if there isn’t mastery behind how you show up, there is no credibility.

I have recently thought that my content or what I share isn’t all that useful to many people. Mainly because very few people work on the kinds of problems I work on. I mean if I was solving regular ent experience problems I would work differently.

The engineers who collab w/ me on POCs for immersive 3D experiences get my approach now - what I’m trying to learn, how we manifest the q’s, the what-ifs to poke at it, how we expose variables that shape the UX, and how we architect options for testing. It’s all short hand communication now.

I tend to view my work as learning, as if each project was a thesis that I’d later present. It kinda works out that way because usually every year and a half or so, there’s some significant release and/or invention that I can hang my hat on.

A lot of my ideas are based on observation or mental models of experiences I’ve designed before. I always think conceptually about the “rails” of the interaction. For example I used the analogy of the little cars on a track at Disney Land’s Haunted Mansion yesterday to explain an idea.

People who haven’t worked in a domain can’t imagine its complexity. For example, working on any 3D navigation forces you to think of axes of control, what is the human POV, horizon lines, motion, nausea, and what does the invisible gimbal do?