About — origin

Hi I'm Taryn, and I never set out to become a product designer.

I started in neuroscience, studying how people think before I ever thought about how they'd use a screen. During COVID I was working in operations at Commonwealth Bank, and I kept doing the same thing I had been for years without a name for it: seeing a problem, then building something to fix it. A developer I worked with pointed out that was UX. He was right, and I up-skilled.

Looking back, the winding route is exactly why I design the way I do, always from the actual problem, not just the request on the ticket.

Five years on, I've designed across enterprise and startups: complex compliance and enterprise tooling at Atlassian, a multi-year treasury transformation and the accessibility and design-system practice at Macquarie, fintech at Pearler, and most recently three energy-retail products of different maturity as the sole designer at an early-stage startup.

What I offer

The way I work now comes straight out of that history. Good design has gotten cheap and fast to produce, so what I offer is the part that hasn't: knowing which problem is worth solving, and which trade-offs are worth making under real constraints.

Accessibility

I treat accessibility as a design problem to solve with judgement, not a checklist to clear. I built Macquarie's accessibility practice from the ground up, which is why I'm comfortable making deliberate trade-offs when a guideline works against the people it's meant to serve, especially in dense, data-heavy interfaces like financial dashboards. I can defend every call.

How I work

Fig · 01

Own the problem end to end

I take a project from unclear discovery through to shipped delivery, and stay accountable for whether it works.

Fig · 02

Turn ambiguity into a brief

I turn vague, contested problems into a clear brief and roadmap the team can build from.

Fig · 03

Design the whole service

I design the people, systems and handoffs behind an interface, and decide what to surface versus keep out of the way.

Fig · 04

Bring brand and product together

I move between product decisions and brand and creative direction, so the product and its identity are shaped as one.

Fig · 05

Spend time where it counts

I use AI to clear the mechanical work, so more of my time goes to the judgement and the customer.

Fig · 06

Work closely with engineers

I read the codebase and share tooling with engineering, so design decisions match how the product behaves in practice.