I lead the design team at Fora (3 designers, 2 researchers). I report directly to the founder and sit on the Leadership Team, where I help shape product direction.
Fora has over 1,200 communities, 101M MAUs and 55M members. Most recently, I’ve been focused on setting design direction, unblocking the team, and making sure the UX is thoughtful, clear, and human
Here’s a peek at what I've been up to…
Over the past year, I joined Fora’s leadership team, helping shape the yearly roadmap and quarterly planning. I introduced bi-weekly steering committees to guide work and ensure every project is setting clear and ambitious goals that are tied to the set OKRs.
Additionally, I have build up the UX team in terms of skillset and headcount. We've grown from a team of 2 to 5 and I have worked to ensure that design has an equal seat on their teams, driving the EPD processes.
I love tackling ambiguous problems by uncovering unmet user needs and designing solutions that fit into real-world scenarios. I advocated for user research to lead the process before we jump into solutions.
When I joined, research was limited to usability testing before a product launched. Initially, I ran exploratory studies to demonstrate the value of early insights. This led to hiring our first full-time researcher and shifting team mindsets.
Now, research is a core part of our process. We run several studies a month at every point in the product design process. We've run ethnographic studies, concept testing, diary studies, and made sure to embed user-centered metrics as guardrails when we launch.
Over the last couple of years, our UX and engineering teams have been teaming up unify our UI.
Because our audience is highly engaged, even the smallest tweaks require careful planning and early communication, with ongoing adjustments as we learn what works best in practice.
Given engineering constraints and a highly engaged user base, even small changes require early communication and ongoing iteration. Despite that, we've successfully updated our foundational UI (colors, typography, spacing, and icons) and are working through key components like buttons, headers, and cards.
The native Fora app launched in 2023 and has quickly gained traction, growing active users by 23% year over year. Since then, we’ve been steadily nativizing pages and pushing the boundaries of what great UX can be on mobile.
Most recently, the team has revamped the registration process, after several rounds of usability studies. We are already seeing an uptick in successful registrations. We are exploring multi-registration on our forums and are continuously influencing the web platform with fresh interaction patterns.
