Hi there, I’m Sienna!
I am a Product Designer with a love of systems and thoughtfully designed experiences.
Currently, I live in San Francisco, make art, and maintain the local wildlife.
Previously, I worked on Zendesk’s design system and received my Bachelor of Arts in Design from the University of California, Davis.
Zendesk
During the summer of 2021, I joined Zendesk as a Product Design Intern on the design systems team. It was my first time learning what a design system was and how it functioned within an organization. I enjoyed the complexity of the problems and the creativity of my coworkers.
After graduating in 2022, I moved to San Francisco and re-joined Zendesk as an Associate Product Designer, again on the design systems team.
This is some of my favorite work from my two years on the small (but mighty) design systems team.
Design Patterns // Filters
My largest project for Garden, Zendesk’s open-source design system, was documenting filters. Users interact with large datasets in Zendesk every day and rely on finding the data they need to accomplish their jobs to be done. Across the product suite, data could be filtered in many different ways, but there was no source of truth to guide designers and engineers to address the need in the same way throughout the products.
It was important to balance this need for the documentation to be flexible enough to accommodate for varied experiences, while providing a consistent experience that the user could learn over time to accomplish their task with ease.
The solution was pattern documentation on the Garden website that addressed the key areas of the filter interaction that could be standardized across all products. These areas included the entry point into the filtering experience, and the places a filter pattern could live depending on the depth of manipulation to the dataset.
By taking a modular approach, rather than an an overly prescriptive one, there was breathing room for designers to be flexible while maintaining a similar feeling experience each time the user filters their data.
Components // Global Alert
Zendesk’s design system did not have a component suitable for delivering system-wide notifications to users. I designed a global alert component to improve users’ abilities to respond to system notifications and provide feature designers with a component that accounts for their wide range of design needs.
Design systems newsletter
Distributing information about our design system was difficult with a globally distributed team. To share our work across teams, I partnered with one of the amazing content designers to write a design systems newsletter to spread our Garden news and updates. The project provided a space to share updates about a crucial project we were working on that required a significant increase in design system adoption. It was an opportunity to collaborate with an amazing writing partner to improve my own creative and technical writing skills, while also sharing important design system information.
Current projects
At the moment, I am volunteering with Nature in the City to restore local butterfly habitats.
I enjoy oil painting, sculpture making, drawing, and writing in my free time. Occasionally, I exhibit art in San Francisco.
Previous projects
Design Interactive
Design Interactive is the user experience club and consultancy at UC Davis.
The club was in its early phases when I joined as a designer to complete my first UX project. I enjoyed the passionate and innovative community that the club fostered, and found myself becoming more involved over time. I led three teams through their own UX projects and joined the board as Outreach Coordinator. This role was perfect for me, as I got to connect with people from across the industry to speak to new designers at Davis, host workshops about using Figma and ideation exercises, and help students land internships at large companies. It was an incredible experience, and I enjoy our mini reunions at the design conferences across San Francisco!
Me (middle) and the Design Interactive board on final presentation day in 2022!
Cerebral
Cerebral is an app concept I created for my Design for Understanding course at UC Davis.
The app combines elements of my passion for journaling as a practice for self-learning with cognitive behavioral therapy exercises I practiced with my first therapist in college. The goal was to provide students with an accessible, manageable, and free way to practice therapeutic tools in their own time.
My professor gave me an award at the end of the year for the project, which was kind of her!
This is a user flow for identifying feelings, writing, and analyzing the material to process the emotions.