About

Photo of Danielle outside during winter

I have a passion for interaction design and making the world a more accessible and inclusive place.

As a designer, I am very good at taking legacy products with complex and inter-connected workflows, and transitioning them into a streamlined, and modern user experience with lean resources and tight timeframes. My portfolio represents real products that needed good UX, and how we were able to accomplish MVP goals while planning for future iterations as priority and resourcing allowed.

As a manager and UX advocate, I designed and created the UX organization from scratch within MediSked while acting as the lead individual contributor since 2017. 

Outside of work, I love knitting 🧶 and running 🏃 , but not at the same time. 

Before I did design and UX, I worked as a freelance children's book illustrator and ran a webcomic for 5 years. There was even a time I performed with a circus group for a short while in college.

Stay #UXcited !

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(Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are my own, and may not reflect those of my current employer.)

Popular posts from this blog

Practice Site: Keyboard Accessible Tooltip Fail

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While reading about keyboard input methods and learning about the success criteria requiring custom keyboard instructions for any custom key commands, one method of accomplishing this was using a tool tip to present the instructions. It mentioned that the tooltip would have to be accessible via keyboard navigation and be able to be read by a screen reader. That reminded me that on my practice site, I spent a significant amount of time creating an example of success criteria for 3.1.3 to provide a definition of an unusual word when the user hovers over the text "affordance" displaying in a tooltip. I did not, however, make this accessible to keyboard-only users or screen readers. Turns out it wasn't even focusable until I gave it a tab index. More investigation into ARIA Practices for 3.24 Tooltip Widget call out specifically that the tooltip container requires role="tooltip" (which I did not have), and the element triggering the tooltip references the tooltip ...
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Boiling the Ocean of Accessibility

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It can be daunting to look at an entire platform and be told, "Ok, now make it accessible." You don't need revolutionary planning, or exhaustive sprints to start. Including some accessibility work into regular sprint planning can offset any extra LOE, and you can start adding accessibility requirements right into each ticket. In a blog post for MediSked that I wrote in 2021, " Modular Accessibility for All Users ", I outline some easy ways to incorporate real accessibility into the SDLC, and start making progress to a completely accessible product as a whole. Some of the basics include: Using a third-party library of components that have accessibility built in. (Like Kendo UI for VUE or Deque Code Library )You'll still need to adjust and apply them right, but it will get you most of the way there. Include it in every ticket. Link to specific areas that apply to that ticket so engineers and testers know what to focus on. You can link right to the Deque chec...
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Practice Site: Accessible Forms

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Today I finally bit the bullet and focused on creating a page on the practice site that would allow me to practice with form components, and live events based on actions. I have the basics down thanks to a friend of mine who walked me through the tools and resources that would be best for this very specific scenario and wrote the skeleton of the page that I could edit to make more accessible. She recommended using JQuery and JavaScript to avoid requiring a database or AJAX. Thanks to w3school.com for their amazing resources. My goal is to make the form fields clear on each submit, and post the data in a styled way on the page. I'd also like to make each submit speak a "success" message to alert the user of the new content, and of course, add labels to everything. Since this took the entire day, it will have to do for now. Luckily there are built-in focus states for the input and button elements by default. This was a productive day, but I may need to take a walk after ...
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