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Hi, I’m Jessica Darby

UX Architect, Product Design Lead, and Certified Usability Analyst with nearly 20 years of experience.

I fix real problems and create products people actually use. Increasingly, that means designing AI experiences people can trust, and using AI to make my own practice faster and more rigorous.

With AI, I focus on what it should take on, what stays with people, and how they stay in control throughout the process. I keep a person in the loop where decisions carry real consequences, and build clean routes to a human when the AI reaches its limit. AI is also part of how I work at every stage, from making sense of research to exploring ideas, prototyping and checking the details. It helps me move faster, test more options and bring stakeholders in earlier, so decisions get made sooner and feedback comes in while it can still shape the work. I pair that speed with a strong system underneath it, because speed without a system just creates inconsistency faster.

Underneath that is nearly two decades of research, strategy, systems thinking and execution across health tech, fintech, edtech and enterprise SaaS. I’ve been the sole designer at a VC-backed startup through acquisition, built design systems that scaled across entire product suites, and led UX on cross-functional teams in enterprise environments, aligning executives, engineering and design around a shared direction.

New tools change how we design and create, but they don’t change why. I’m here to embrace what comes next, and to make sure we never lose sight of the human element driving it forward.

Jessica Darby, UX Architect and Product Design Lead

Capabilities

UX Strategy, Research & Information Architecture
Product Design & Strategy
Design Systems & Interaction Design
AI & Agentic Experience Design
Facilitation, Business Analysis & Requirements
Cross-Functional Leadership

Impact

  • Identified automation opportunities worth around 60 labour hours a week for a compliance-critical authoring team
  • Helped cut information lookup time from minutes to seconds with an AI knowledge assistant
  • Led a 231-token design system spanning light and dark mode for a national banking platform
  • Sole designer on a migration platform that has moved over 1.1 million courses across 12 countries

I also bring working knowledge of HTML and CSS and a background in branding and creative direction, which shape how I collaborate with engineers and how I think about product identity.

How I work

I start by understanding how work actually happens, not how it’s assumed to happen. That means talking to the people doing it, watching them work and mapping where it breaks down.

From there I frame the problem: what the business needs, what users need, and increasingly, what AI should take on and what should stay with people.

Then I make it real, fast. Prototypes put something in front of stakeholders early, so decisions are made on evidence rather than opinion.

Finally, I prove it. I test with users, define what good looks like, and build the systems and documentation that let the work hold up after handoff.

I’m direct, I communicate early, and I don’t add process for its own sake. I’d rather solve the right problem simply than the wrong one elegantly.

What I Bring

AI Experience Design
Human-in-the-loop workflows, trust and transparency design, conversational UX, escalation and handoff, AI evaluation and testing
AI-Assisted Practice
Rapid prototyping, research synthesis, design system QA, Claude, Claude Code, Figma Make, Copilot
Design Systems & Strategy
Design systems and tokens, governance, information architecture, UX strategy, process design
Research & Facilitation
Usability testing, contextual inquiry, stakeholder interviews, journey mapping, heuristic evaluation, workshop facilitation
Design & Prototyping
Figma, Adobe Creative Cloud, wireframing, high-fidelity prototyping
Certifications
Certified Usability Analyst (HFI)
Behance
LinkedIn
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