Quick & Dirty
About 1 weekA small, lower-stakes fix with a quick turnaround, like UI copy for a handful of screens or a few error messages.
- Discovery kickoff
- Polished Figma spec
- 1 round of revisions
Your product is powerful. Your users are confused.
Is this you? I can help. I make complex concepts easy to understand by designing the words and systems that remove the kind of high cognitive load that plagues users and tanks business.
Hi, I'm Dan
- designer
- systems thinker
- storyteller
- data driven
My expertise is in technical areas of B2B software (permissions, admin experiences, etc.) where user confusion and mistakes can be catastrophic, but my skills (and results) can be applied widely.
I spent 6+ years at Atlassian on the Confluence Cloud team crafting myriad experiences, defining content strategies, and shaping content operations.
Before software, I studied English, wrote professionally as a medical journalist (ocular surgery and optometry), and earned an MFA in creative writing while working for the university's marketing department.
These experiences have shaped my expertise in making technical material plain and crafting compelling content that converts.
How I help
What support do you need?
Tactical
For smaller, specific experiences
Embedded
2–3 weeksA meatier experience with more complexity or stakes, where the right fix might change the UI or the flow.
- Discovery kickoff
- Good, Better, Best directions
- Figma spec and rationale
- Implementation support
Full Rigor
4–6 weeksA substantial experience that may need user validation, stakeholder alignment, or leadership approval.
- Stakeholder interviews
- User research or testing
- Good, Better, Best directions
- Figma spec and implementation support
Strategic
For larger experiences, support across multiple experiences, or operations support
The Diagnosis Specialist
You know there's a problem but can't pin it down, or don't have time to.
- UX audit
- Journey mapping
- Problem framing doc
- Recommendations
The Solutions Expert
You know what the problem is and where it shows up but don't have the expertise or time to fix it.
- Content strategy doc
- Prototyping
- Stakeholder alignment
The Future-Proofer
The same problems keep coming back, and you want to stop them at the source.
- Content service design spec
- Implementation plan
- Governance, style guides, and standards
What I've done
Hard problems made plain
Full portfolio →RBAC in Confluence
- complex
- change management
Turned a deeply technical permissions overhaul into a clear, actionable transition plan, so admins could move their organizations over to roles at scale.
Building out Premium
- upsell strategy
- conversions
Shaped how Confluence's Premium features were named, explained, and sold to optimize Premium penetration as a share of total customer plans.
A new content service model
- content operations
Redesigned how content work is prioritized and requested to help content designers both focus on the most important work and cover more ground.
Content problem? Let's chat.
Tell me what's tangled. I'll tell you plainly whether I can help.