Work with me
Your product works. People still hesitate before they hand it anything.
That hesitation has causes, and they are findable. Finding them is most of what I do.
I am Ashley, a human factors engineer and product designer. For twenty years I have worked on the systems people’s lives run on, mostly in fraud prevention, security, compliance and privacy. I design the products that sit between people and the things they cannot afford to get wrong, and I write about what I find there.
Consulting · Fractional design · Workshops · Speaking
The work
Four ways to work together
01
Consulting
A short engagement with an answer at the end of it. You bring a decision you are stuck on, a flow that is losing people, or a product you want looked at properly. You get findings, a recommendation, and the reasoning behind it, written down.
A few hours to a few weeks
02
Fractional product design
AI native product design as part of your team. Research, design, prototypes, design systems, and the judgment calls in between. I take real work and ship it, rather than handing you a deck about it.
Ongoing, for as long as it is useful
03
Workshops and trainings
An hour taught live to your team or your members. Forty-five minutes presented and fifteen of questions, singly or as a series of three. Everyone leaves with a one-page summary they can act on.
One hour, or a series of three
04
Speaking and media
Conferences, company meetings, associations, podcasts and interviews. I speak about people and technology, and I bring the research rather than the opinions.
Remote or in person
What I work on
Three things, in this order
01
Trust
Whether a person believes your product will do what it says with whatever they hand it. Fraud prevention, security, privacy and compliance all land here, and they land on the person long before they land on the business.
02
Accessibility
Whether a person can use it at all. I put accessibility above usability, because something that works for ordinary people with disabilities is almost certainly usable for ordinary people without them, while the reverse tells you nothing.
03
Conversion
Whether they buy it, adopt it and go on using it. These three are connected, and they work in this order. Conversion is what you get when the first two are true.
- Trust and trustworthy design
- Fraud prevention
- Security and privacy
- Compliance
- Accessibility
- Usability and human factors
- Conversion and adoption
- AI native product design
- Design systems
- Research and evaluation
I build the things I write about.
Everything on this page comes out of shipping real products inside large organizations, where the constraints are real and the consequences land on somebody. I am not a lawyer and not a cybersecurity engineer, and I do not pretend to be either. I am the person who has spent two decades watching where these systems leave people exposed, and designing better ones.
The record
Where this comes from
- Twenty years in productProduct research and design at JPMorgan Chase, Apple, Oracle and T-Mobile.
- Fraud and paymentsAt Chase, a vice president of product research in business banking, working directly with thousands of small business owners on fraud and payments, and on fraud protection products that blocked billions of dollars in fraudulent charges in a single year.
- Trained for itA master of science in human factors and systems engineering, and anthropology before that.
- Teaching, for creditOne of the highest rated instructors on LearnFormula, where my classes carry continuing education credit.
- On camera, for AdobeA host on Adobe XD’s live sessions. Those episodes are still up.
- WritingAccounted For is my first book, published by Haven Smith & Company. More are on the way.
How it starts
Tell me what you are working on
A few sentences is plenty. What you are building, what is in your way, and roughly when you need it.
I read every one of these myself. If it looks like a fit I will send you a link to my calendar, and we will talk before anybody writes a proposal.
There is no booking link on this page on purpose. I would rather read a few lines from you first than have you pick a slot and hope.
What happens next: I read it, and you hear from me either way. If it is a fit, I send you a link to my calendar. If it is not, I will tell you that plainly and point you at whoever is.
Two other ways in
If you are not hiring anybody today
The book
Accounted For
How to organize the digital life you have and leave it in order for the people you love. The first chapters are free.
Read the first chaptersThe guides
Everything I have published
The Digital Life Management System™ and every guide built around it, as printable PDFs and EPUBs you own outright.
See the shop