Good practice needed a way to travel.

I — Inspiration

Three unmet needs could become one program

OrangeWorks Engineering sometimes lacked real summer-intern projects. Innovation ideas waited for resources. UX designers wanted to develop mentoring skills. Each need could have been addressed separately. A fellow Staff Designer and I saw a way to connect them.

She approached me about creating mentor training. Together, we developed UX MEOW: designer-led teams in which interns could explore real innovation opportunities and designers could practice mentoring and small-group leadership. The program joined work that needed attention with people who needed experience.

That same question—how can useful expertise reach the people who need it?—also shaped my work on UX Core Tenets and the Accessibility Council. These were different initiatives with different partners. Across them, my role was to turn knowledge into something a team could practice, inspect, and carry forward.

D — Design Process

Give people a structure they can work through

For UX MEOW, I developed mentor training materials, led training workshops, and sourced projects. My co-founder and I met innovation champions to clarify their ideas and translate them into practical starting points for design sprints.

We built a guided collaboration board using the GV design sprint process, including activity instructions and supporting resources. The first cohort paired 12 interns with 12 designer mentors in six teams. An unpacking day brought research, technical constraints, stakeholder interview transcripts, and experts into the same conversation.

Teams moved from problem statements through Crazy 8s, sketches, and low-fidelity prototypes. At the midpoint, they presented the opportunity, business goals, and design decisions to champions and stakeholders. After feedback, they revised prototypes, coded solutions, and tested with Home Depot customers and employees. Those were working explorations and field tests, not claims of production launches.

E — Engagement

A principle became useful when it changed a decision

UX leadership sponsored Design Excellence to strengthen training and practice. I volunteered to develop UX Core Tenets, drawing on company values, publicly available practices, and interviews with designers, managers, directors, and product partners.

I facilitated synthesis with volunteer Staff and Principal designers, then presented a proposal to design, engineering, and product leadership. Their feedback informed seven tenets. I supported rollout through workshops, an organization-wide talk, and posters.

One tenet called for decisions informed by evidence, ethics, and empathy. Teams I worked with translated its evidence component into decision gates: pivotal choices needed a traceable basis. Timelines and leadership requests sometimes created friction. The work was learning to distinguish perceived urgency from actual risk, so teams could make room for research. The demonstrated change was on those teams; it was not a measured organization-wide adoption result.

A — Action

The mouse was an option. The keyboard was a workflow.

I founded and managed an Accessibility Council to connect practitioners, share field-tested work, train designers, and offer audits and recommendations. Its credibility came from evidence and examples, rather than enforcement authority.

A showcase by the paint-mixing app team supplied a memorable example. Their testing found that associates had built stations and habits around keyboards; some stores rarely used a mouse or no longer had one. The presenting team owned that research. The council gave its lesson a wider audience, and other teams requested help with keyboard controls and field evaluation.

I personally conducted field observation for store Order Management and delivered a report and recommendations. Its move toward mouse-first interaction had made it easier for employees to start using without memorizing hotkeys. But processing was reported to be slower, and screen-reader use was difficult.

The team changed navigation, added keyboard shortcuts, and introduced a dockable shortcut reference and contextual hints. My contribution was field research and recommendations; the response was team work. It addressed discoverability and keyboard use together, without establishing a measured speed gain or complete accessibility remediation.