Designing for customers, crews, and everything in between.

Sometimes the user is a customer trying to find out if their neighborhood is affected by a shutdown. Sometimes it’s an employee trying to stay safe during a pandemic. And sometimes it’s a field worker driving past miles of power lines, looking for something that could become a serious problem.

At Sempra, I was the sole designer across a series of fast-moving projects that explored how new technology could make those experiences simpler, faster, and more useful.

Making customer interactions easier

Some of the work was wonderfully practical. I redesigned experiences within Sempra’s events area, including registration forms that made it easier for customers to discover events and sign up without fighting their way through the process.

But we were also exploring entirely new ways for customers to interact with their utility.

I designed an Alexa voice user interface (VUI) that allowed customers to ask about local weather conditions and Public Safety Power Shutoff alerts in their area. That meant thinking beyond screens and designing conversational flows, intents, utterances, prompts, error handling, and voice interaction models, along with training and refining the natural-language experience so Alexa could understand the different ways real people might ask the same question.

What if a camera could spot a bad power line?

One of my favorite projects started with a much different problem: identifying potentially faulty power infrastructure.

We designed a mobile concept that combined LiDAR, imagery, and computer vision to help SDG&E field employees identify potential issues with power lines and equipment simply by capturing photos or video as they traveled through the field.

Instead of asking someone to translate an emerging technology into a product, I worked closely with Sempra stakeholders and Accenture engineers to rapidly turn the idea into something people could actually interact with.

We prototyped quickly, put working concepts in front of Sempra leadership, learned, adjusted, and kept moving.

Then 2020 changed the brief.

When COVID arrived, the problem became much more immediate: how do you understand what is happening across a large workforce quickly enough to help keep people safe?

I designed a COVID-19 tracking dashboard that brought critical workforce health information into a clear visual experience, helping teams understand patterns and make informed operational decisions during a period when the situation was changing constantly.

Different problem. Same approach.

Understand what people need. Strip away what they don’t. Prototype the idea quickly enough that everyone can react to something real.

I didn't stop at the design file.

Across these projects, I worked directly with Sempra’s marketing team and Accenture’s engineering teams, often moving rapidly from an idea to a prototype that could be presented to senior leadership.

And when engineering needed another set of hands, I crossed over.

I contributed front-end development in React and mobile application development, helping turn prototypes into working experiences and supporting engineers as concepts moved toward implementation.

That combination became a big part of how I like to work: strategy, UX, interaction design, prototyping, and enough code to help close the distance between “here’s the idea” and “here, try it.”