Hi I'm
GraceI'm a senior user researcher based in San Francisco. I love being creative and spending time outdoors.
Portfolio
I'm a Senior UX Researcher at Apple.
I focus on mixed-methods research, with the goal of grounding product decisions in real user insight. These projects are personal work that reflect how I think and create outside of Apple.
Lighting Design.
A two-year project in translucent porcelain, in pursuit of a warm, atmospheric glow.
About the project
I was living in an old San Francisco apartment with warm, flattering light — most of it coming through frosted glass fixtures and incandescent bulbs. I wanted to recreate that quality of light — that warm, atmospheric glow — with a ceramic light.
I'd heard that porcelain, thrown thin enough, can be translucent. That became the starting point: two years of making, testing, and iterating toward a ceramic light cover that glows.
Prove the Concept
The first question was whether porcelain could be thrown thin enough to let light through. I made a test piece, and it worked — the translucency was clear, and the concept held.
You can see here my test piece placed on top of a light fixture in my house.
Develop a Plan
With the concept proven, I sketched out a plan. I needed to figure out how to fit the lighting component inside the piece, how the parts would connect, and how to make it sit flat on a surface. The goal was a fully standalone lamp — one self-contained object you could plug in and use.
Initial Design
The first version got the overall look right, but had real problems. The light fixture sat separately from the rest of the piece, the cord exit felt unresolved, and the components didn't come together as one. Only about one in every five shade attempts came out properly translucent.
Iterate on the Shade
After trying hand building, carving, and other methods, I landed on slip casting. I threw the lampshade form on the wheel, made a plaster mold from it, and used the mold to cast extremely thin porcelain shells. I also took a slip casting class to learn the technique properly.
Traditionally, slip is left in a mold for 30–40 minutes to build up the walls. For these, I pulled it at five — well outside the standard parameters of the method, but the only way to get the walls thin enough to glow.
Iterate on the Base
While I'm most comfortable with the ceramic medium, it was time to try a new medium that could solve some of the issues a ceramic base introduced. I took a wood carving class, learned to use the lathe, and switched the base to wood. Wood made it straightforward to install the lamp hardware and drill a clean hole for the cord — both things that had always been messy in ceramic.
The bigger gain was fit. With a wood base, I could bring the fully fired shade to the lathe and carve the groove to match it exactly — test-fitting the shade as I went, shaving a little more until it sat properly. The shrinkage problem went away.
Slip casting for the shade, wood turning for the base — after two years of experimentation, I had a consistent, replicable method for making the light.
Conversations with Women.
A zine exploring the everyday feelings we don't always talk about.
About the project
I've always been curious about the feelings people carry through ordinary days — not the hardest moments, but the quiet, everyday ones that rarely get named out loud. This zine grew out of that curiosity.
I took a zine-making class to learn the craft, designing and printing the cover art by hand. Then I set out to interview women — not about trauma or turning points, but about the rhythms of regular life. Every conversation followed the same five questions, starting with: tell me about your day.
The goal was to make space for these everyday feelings and the conversations around them.
Crafting the five questions took care. I wanted each one to be open enough that participants could take it anywhere — no specific emotions named, no examples offered that might anchor their thinking. The intent was to let each person fully describe their own experience, in their own words, without being steered toward what I expected to hear.
After the first few interviews, I was surprised by the range of feelings people named — I'd expected more overlap with my own. The variety was a useful reminder of how differently we each experience the world.
The questions
Tell me about your day so far today — what's happened?
Is there a feeling you've been feeling a lot recently?
Tell me about a time recently when you felt that way.
How do you feel about the role that feeling plays in your life?
In the future, what do you want your relationship to that feeling to look like?
The zine
Full interviews coming soon.
The AI Feedback Loop.
What happens when you take design, dev, and product out of the product lifecycle?
The idea
This project explores what happens when AI and usability testing are connected in a closed loop with no designer or developer in the middle. The premise is simple: an AI generates a prototype, real users test it, and their feedback goes straight back into the AI to generate the next version.
The interesting question isn't whether AI can design — it's what kind of design emerges when the only input is real user behavior, iterated on continuously and automatically.
Tools like UserTesting.com already let you connect to users on demand. In a fully realized version of this loop, a design could go from prototype to tested to revised without a human decision point in between. And since most usability testing doesn't require specialized expertise, this could be an inexpensive way to iterate.
To be clear: I believe humans should be in the loop with AI. This project is a deliberate experiment to see what happens when they're not.
The result
My takeaway
It took more iterations than I expected to get to a decent-looking app. But, surprisingly, it did get there.
That said, the designs Claude produced didn't always follow best practices or standard design patterns — it was optimizing for the feedback it received, not for what a skilled designer would know to do from the start.
Claude also didn't prioritize findings the way I would when conducting research — it treated feedback from one user the same as feedback from three. A more experienced researcher would weight findings by how many users raised them. More specific instructions, a tighter prompt structure, or a more specific skill could help address this.
The experiment
Iteration One
The core flow worked — users could identify a tree without friction. Three problems emerged: a "?" placeholder icon that everyone flagged as unfinished, a results page that didn't telegraph scrolling (one user never found the fun fact or the CTA), and a consistent ask for more depth — reference photos, tappable match cards, a habitat map.
Iteration Two
Results improved but the landing page was unanimously called "funny" or unpolished. The bigger issue: the green "Identify a Tree" button was so dominant that users interpreted the confirmation dialog as a continuation of the same step. They kept expecting to press the main button again rather than choose from the dialog.
Iteration Three
The identify flow and results screen stopped drawing complaints entirely — a meaningful improvement from round one. The one issue all three users raised independently, in almost identical terms: a black "?" box sitting on top of the green circle in the hero. The tree emoji wasn't rendering in the iOS simulator and was falling back to a placeholder. One rendering bug, otherwise working.
About Me
I love to build beautiful, functional things.
I'm a UX researcher and designer with an engineering background.
At Northwestern, I studied Computer Science and Design.
Within the CS curriculum, I focused on Human Computer Interaction and Machine Learning. I was a TA for 5 quarters across different CS classes. This taught me how to break down complex topics and explain them clearly, and gave me my first real experience in mentorship and building relationships through teaching.
I started at Apple in a cross-functional rotational program.
Across my rotations, I worked in product management, front-end development, and user research, which gave me a strong foundation for working across disciplines. From there, I grew into increasingly scoped research roles, leading research on Apple TV+ before building Apple Legal's research practice from the ground up.
Outside of work, you'll likely find me at my ceramics studio.
I also love backpacking, rock climbing, and exploring in the Sierras.
Let's connect!
I'm always happy to connect with other UX researchers — I'm curious about what the research experience looks like across different companies and teams. Feel free to reach out!
