Athen Pellicci

Selected work

…and that’s why I make my own luck.

Designing for request deflection instead of faster processing

Asked to make processing faster. The data said a third of the requests never needed to exist.

Getting ten products to stop answering the same question ten ways

Ten products, forty-seven button styles. The library was the easy part; adoption took a year.

Putting a revenue number on design decisions

Design kept losing to work that arrived with a number attached. So I went and got numbers.

Where I have worked

Here’s where I’ve worked.

Staff Product Designer, Experience Measurement

The Home Depot

I help design the experience measurement practice: the standards, the guidance system, and the operations behind them. Research with our ninety-six UX partners led to a redesigned support system, compressing ad-hoc requests across scattered channels into a single routed intake queue with defined triage paths.

Now building agents that audit instrumentation against the published standards and generate the executive reporting, extending the practice past headcount.
Lead Product Designer

OPEXUS / Casepoint

The first designer they hired. A design system across ten products, the company’s first research practice, and the product analytics function underneath both. Ten products, more than seventy federal agencies, and no shared vocabulary between any of them when I arrived.

Research on record custodian delay was cited in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on the Freedom of Information Act.
Lead UX Designer

Armedia

Sole designer on MEMS NextGen, the USDA platform managing more than five hundred annual program reviews across federal food assistance. Weekly sessions with regional office staff, and a systematic rebuild of the review and compliance workflows.

Usability up 35% · task completion time down 25%
Product Designer

PoolCalculator

Usage analysis showed professional pool services were worth roughly ten times what homeowners were. I moved the product off per-pool pricing onto tiered subscriptions and kept the core free for casual users.

Conversion up 18% · retention up 20%

What I hold to

And here’s what I’ve learned.

01

Visual decisions come last

A designer is not a person brought in at the end to make something look considered. Anything on a screen that cannot be traced back to what the product has to do is decoration.

02

Less work beats faster work

A tool that prevents 30% of the requests beats one that speeds up all of them by 10%. Ask what would remove the work before asking how to make it quicker.

03

When software is unsure, it says so and waits

A model returns a score, not an answer. The model proposes, the person decides, and the interface makes it easier to check than to accept.

04

Build it instead of proposing it

A working prototype costs less than the three meetings it takes to describe the same idea, and it changes the question from whether the concept is sound to whether the execution is right.

05

Make the irreversible thing slower than everything around it

Almost every action in a product can be undone. The one that cannot should not use the same confirmation dialog as the ones that can.

06

One comment is not a signal

People notice change and say so, and then they stop noticing. The question was never whether someone would remark on a color; it was whether defect rates and build times moved.

07

Check your numbers before someone else does

The first number nobody wants to hear gets the measurement questioned before the finding. That is fair, and it is survivable if you already did the cross-check.

08

Adoption is part of the design

What has to change about how people work is a design problem. Treating it as somebody else’s rollout problem is how a product that works lands at a third of its projection.

09