Schwab
A bold concept was already locked — I came in late to make sure it actually worked for the people who’d use it.
Some projects you shape from the blank page. This wasn’t one — and that was the whole story. Rosetta was preparing a pitch to Charles Schwab and needed a usability voice in the room before it went out the door. I joined near the end to pressure-test the idea from the user’s side and help the team walk in confident.
The creative was locked. The usability voice was missing.
Rosetta had an idea they believed in, and they needed to build it into something that would win the work. What they didn’t have was someone whose entire job was to look at the concept through a usability lens and ask, on Schwab’s behalf, does this actually work for a real person trying to get something done?
The Smart Square.
The idea was a single, strong visual metaphor: a square on the screen represented a distinct area of your financial life, and it expanded to reveal how Schwab could help you there. Tap it and it grew into a panel of contextual content; the layout reorganized around it. The concept was locked before I arrived — it wasn’t mine to overturn. It was mine to make work.
A repeatable pattern — not a gimmick bolted on every screen.
Because the metaphor was fixed, my real problem was integration: how to use one expressive interaction consistently across everything Schwab asked the pitch to cover, without it feeling like a flourish. I worked it the way I work when time is short — on paper, fast, in variations, then quick animations to show how the square actually moved.
I explored the square’s behavior two ways, then mapped the winning pattern as a system across the pages Schwab cared about.
Expand & dock
The square grows and docks to the right as a persistent panel, holding context in place while you work.
Rotate into a corner
The square rotates into a corner and content flows down beneath it, freeing the page to breathe.
The square is a promise: we meet you where you are.
On a consultant profile, I sketched the square revealing contextual detail per section — branch and contact info, financial credentials, experience, community and professional affiliations — so the reveal felt personal. “I belong to Rotary and am a past president” reads very differently from a bulleted stat block. The through-line I fought for: the square isn’t decoration — it’s a promise that Schwab shows you exactly what’s relevant, section by section.
Which hills are worth dying on when you have no time to rebuild.
I joined a project so far along that if I saw something I didn’t like, I often couldn’t ask the team to go back — the clock wouldn’t allow it. So I made a rule: I only fought for changes that were genuinely problematic from a usability standpoint. Real usability risk? I pushed. Something that merely bugged me — a preference, a nicety — even when it bugged me a lot, I let it go. That triage was the actual job.
Bring the user perspective in while the concept is still soft enough to move.
The team walked into the pitch with a concept examined from the user’s side, not just the creative’s — the square more defensible, its behavior more considered, its application more consistent because someone had sketched through the awkward cases in advance. Coming onto a nearly-finished project doesn’t leave room for true usability work; by the time it’s a deck, the best you can do is defend it — a much smaller job than designing.
Three days at the very end, with no formal KPIs for my slice — and I never learned whether Rosetta won the work, so I don’t claim it.