Selected Projects

eBay People Team AI Transformation

eBay's HR support was drowning in tickets, most of them for questions that should have had instant answers. I came in as both Product Manager and UX Lead, sat between the People Team and IT Services & Solutions, and shipped three AI agents that changed how 10,000+ employees interact with HR.

The 3 AI Agents

What made this work

• PM + UX in one role: I owned the product roadmap, prioritized the backlog, ran stakeholder alignment, and designed every conversation flow. No handoff between discovery and delivery.
• Ticket analysis first: Analyzed 8,000+ support tickets before writing a single requirement. The three agents came from real volume, not assumptions.
• Regional variations: Built separate conversation paths for APAC and EMEA with different policies, language nuances, and compliance rules.
• Measurement before launch: Set deflection rate, adoption rate, and employee satisfaction targets upfront. Iterated based on those, not on how the demo looked.

eBay AI Transformation Workshops

Beyond deploying AI agents, a core part of the AI Ambassador role is making AI practical and accessible for people who aren't engineers. I designed and facilitated AI Transformation Workshops across eBay teams, and run ongoing AI best practices sessions with the People Team, helping employees move from AI curiosity to confident, daily use.

What Makes These Workshops Work

• Workflow-first, not tool-first: Every session starts with a real workflow problem the team faces. Tools are introduced as solutions to that specific problem, not as features to learn in the abstract.
• Hands-on from minute one: Participants open the tools and use them during the workshop. No slide-only sessions. Every concept is immediately applied to a real example from their own work.
• Playbooks that survive the room: Each workshop produces a take-home playbook: tested prompts, tool shortcuts, and workflow templates the team can use independently after the session ends.
• Measured follow-through: Post-session check-ins track whether the tools are actually being used. Sessions iterate based on what stuck and what didn't.

Yahoo! Ads Rebranding

The Yahoo! Ads brand had been living on borrowed time. The original blue had been chosen in a different era, for a different competitive landscape. The advertising industry had evolved. Brands had become more sophisticated, competitors had modernized, and Yahoo! Ads was starting to look its age. I led the full rebrand of Yahoo! Ads, from initial audit through final style direction and implementation.

Process

The rebrand followed a rigorous research-driven process, not a gut-driven "we need to look fresh" exercise:

• Brand audit: Documented all existing brand touchpoints: product UI, marketing materials, presentations, documentation. Found 14 different shades of "Yahoo! blue" in use across surfaces.
• Competitive analysis: Benchmarked the visual identity of 8 major DSP and ad-tech competitors, identifying emerging design directions and areas of differentiation.
• Stakeholder interviews: Ran structured interviews with sales, marketing, and product leadership to understand how Yahoo! Ads was perceived internally and where the brand needed to go.
• Style direction exploration: Developed and pressure-tested three distinct direction boards with internal and external audiences before committing.

Brand direction exploration: final direction

Before/after: Yahoo! Ads brand evolution

• 22% increase in brand recognition in post-launch advertiser survey
• Modernized, unified visual identity adopted across product UI, marketing, and sales materials
• 14 legacy color variants consolidated into a single, token-based color system
• Rebrand shipped across all Yahoo! Ads surfaces within a single release cycle

Beyond Brand

UI System Unification

The rebrand created the opportunity to fix something the platform desperately needed: eliminating the visual fragmentation that had accumulated across Yahoo! Ads surfaces over years of independent team shipping. I ran a parallel UI audit, cataloging over 200 inconsistencies across 6 surfaces, and used the brand migration as the forcing function to implement canonical component standards platform-wide - one rollout, two outcomes.

• Cross-surface audit: Catalogued every instance of 12 core component types - buttons, tables, modals, filters, inputs, and more - across all Yahoo! Ads surfaces. 200+ inconsistencies documented, prioritized, and resolved.
• Canonical component system: Defined the single authoritative version of each component, selected for accessibility quality, usage prevalence, and alignment with the new brand direction.
• Cross-team design review: Established a weekly design review that gave teams a forum to flag new patterns before shipping - a practice that became permanent after the rebrand shipped.

200+Inconsistencies resolved

–40%UI-related bugs

6Surfaces unified

Cross-surface inconsistency audit overview

Component variation examples before unification

Yahoo! BiDi Language Support

Bi-directional (BiDi) language support, the ability for a product to render correctly in both left-to-right (LTR) and right-to-left (RTL) scripts, is one of the most systematically underinvested areas in product design. Arabic and Hebrew together represent hundreds of millions of users. At Yahoo!, the RTL experience across portals was inconsistent at best and broken at worst.

I led Yahoo!'s Center of Excellence for BiDi design, establishing the design standards, tooling, and process for RTL support across 7 Yahoo! portals, and building the internal expertise that made sustained RTL quality possible.

Challenge

• RTL rendering inconsistent across 7 Yahoo! portals: some mirrored correctly, others partially, others not at all
• No centralized RTL design standards; each team handling RTL independently, producing divergent results
• Translation overhead was high: manual processes, inconsistent handoffs, and rework cycles consumed significant engineering and localization time
• Component library had no RTL specifications; components were designed LTR-only
• BiDi expertise was siloed in one or two engineers; no design-side knowledge base existed

What I Built

• RTL Design Standards: Authored the Yahoo! RTL Design Standards: a comprehensive guide covering layout mirroring rules, typography behavior, icon directionality conventions, number and date formatting, and animation direction.
• Component RTL specifications: Added RTL specifications to every component in the Yahoo! design system, including mirrored layouts, directional icon variants, and text alignment rules for each component.
• Localization automation tools: Worked with engineering to develop tooling that automated significant portions of the LTR-to-RTL translation process, reducing the manual overhead that had been a bottleneck.
• BiDi Center of Excellence: Established a cross-functional community of practice for BiDi design, running monthly workshops and maintaining a shared knowledge base that grew to 80+ documented patterns.
• 7 Portal rollout: Coordinated and QA'd the RTL implementation rollout across Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Lifestyle, Yahoo! Weather, and Yahoo! Homepage.

BiDi design standards: LTR/RTL layout principles

Component RTL specifications: navigation mirroring

Portal RTL rollout: Yahoo! Mail Arabic

Portal RTL rollout: Yahoo! Finance Hebrew

• Expanded full RTL support to hundreds of millions of Arabic and Hebrew users across 7 Yahoo! portals
• 60% reduction in translation overhead through localization automation tooling
• BiDi Center of Excellence became a durable internal resource, still referenced years after the initial rollout
• RTL component specifications became a required part of the Yahoo! design system contribution process

Yahoo! Mail Accessibility

When I inherited the Yahoo! Mail accessibility audit findings, the headline number was stark: 68% WCAG 2.1 compliance across the primary mail web application. For a product used by hundreds of millions of people, that number represented millions of users who couldn't access core functionality with assistive technology: screen readers that couldn't navigate the folder tree, keyboard users who lost focus context mid-flow, and low-vision users getting insufficient contrast on interactive elements.

This was not a checkbox project. I treated accessibility as a quality dimension, the same standard we'd hold for visual design or performance, and drove it through the organization as such.

Research Approach

I paired automated tooling (axe, WAVE, Lighthouse) with structured usability testing sessions with actual assistive technology users: screen reader users navigating with NVDA and VoiceOver, keyboard-only users completing core email tasks, and participants using high-contrast display modes. The automated tools found the obvious violations; the user testing found the painful ones.

Accessibility audit overview

Focus management redesign

ARIA landmark structure

Challenge

• 68% WCAG 2.1 compliance, well below acceptable threshold for a mass-market product
• Focus management broken across modal dialogs, compose window, and folder navigation
• Missing ARIA labels on icon-only buttons throughout the toolbar
• Keyboard navigation traps in the message list and compose flow
• Color contrast failures on secondary text elements and disabled states

Solution

• Rebuilt focus management: Redesigned the focus flow for all modal interactions, restoring logical focus order and proper return-focus behavior on dismiss.
• ARIA labeling system: Created a systematic ARIA labeling library for all iconographic and non-text interactive elements.
• Keyboard navigation redesign: Defined keyboard shortcuts and tab order specifications for all major Mail workflows, documented in the design system.
• Color system update: Updated color tokens to meet WCAG AA minimum contrast ratios, working with the design system team to implement changes globally.
• Accessibility design guidelines: Authored the Yahoo! Mail Accessibility Design Standards, adopted across the Mail design team for all future work.

• WCAG 2.1 compliance raised from 68% to 96% across Yahoo! Mail primary surfaces
• Zero critical keyboard accessibility blockers in post-audit re-test
• Accessibility standards adopted into the Yahoo! Mail design system, ensuring future features shipped accessible by default
• Positive feedback from screen reader user test cohort: the first time some participants could complete core mail tasks unassisted

Yahoo! Mail Layout & Themes

Yahoo! Mail's navigation had grown organically over many years. Features were added, folders multiplied, and the left-rail navigation that once felt spacious had become a dense, overwhelming list. User research confirmed what the data hinted at: 30% of users reported getting lost in the navigation when trying to access non-inbox mail folders. And the theme system, meant to give users a sense of ownership over their inbox experience, was limited, outdated, and rarely used.

Challenge

• 30% of users reported difficulty navigating to non-inbox folders
• Navigation structure mixed system folders, user-created folders, and secondary features without clear hierarchy
• Theme selection was buried in settings, and theme options were visually dated
• No dark mode support, an increasingly standard user expectation
• High-contrast theme for accessibility was not available at all

Research

I ran a combination of tree testing (to diagnose the IA issues), card sorting (to understand how users mentally organized their mail features), and a preferences survey on theming (to understand which visual environments users actually wanted). The tree testing confirmed the problem: success rates for navigating to non-inbox destinations dropped below 50% for folders three or more levels deep.

Solution

• Simplified navigation architecture: Reduced the primary navigation to five top-level items, with smart folder grouping and a progressive disclosure pattern for deep folder trees.
• Pinned favorites: Allowed users to pin up to five frequently accessed folders to the top of the navigation for one-tap access.
• Themes redesign: Launched a new theme system with Light, Dark, and High Contrast as first-class options, plus a curated collection of seasonal and lifestyle background themes.
• Dark mode: Designed and documented a complete dark mode token set, ensuring consistent dark treatment across all Mail surfaces.

Redesigned Mail navigation: simplified hierarchy

New theme system: selection interface

Theme center redesign

Dark mode: inbox view

Dark mode: compose view

High-contrast mode: full inbox view

• 30% improvement in navigation task completion efficiency in A/B test
• 20% reduction in bounce rate from the inbox view
• Dark mode adoption exceeded projections: 38% of users switched within the first month
• High-contrast mode provided a meaningful accessibility improvement for low-vision users