I'm Elliot.

I design thoughtful product experiences that scale.

Projects

Turning complexity into clear, meaningful experiences.

Turning Taco Bell Customization Into Fan Expression

Fan Style transformed Taco Bell customization into an experience where fans could turn their favorite orders into something they could name, save, and share.What began as an effort to encourage more sharing became a broader exploration of how customization could become a form of self-expression giving fans something personal enough to share beyond the transaction.

Lead Product Designer, Shop Pod | 2025

As Lead Product Designer for the Shop Pod, I led the native app experience from early concept through launch shaping the creation, saving, and sharing flows while working across Product, Engineering, Marketing, Legal, Analytics, Social, and Global Bell Creative.

The Opportunity

What would make a customized order feel worth sharing in the first place?

We wanted creating a Fan Style to feel like a natural extension of ordering rather than another experience customers had to learn.After customizing an item, fans could turn their creation into a Fan Style, give it a name, save it, and receive a personalized style card designed for sharing.Connecting creation directly to an existing behavior, ordering Taco Bell the way you like it, kept the experience simple while giving fans something more personal to take away from it.

Creating Something Worth Sharing

A Fan Style needed to feel personal, but it also needed to feel unmistakably Taco Bell.I helped establish the product design direction and defined the structure, layout, and constraints for the Fan Style cards. I then partnered with Global Bell Creative to bring more personality into the experience through typography, gradients, and custom artwork while reviewing the creative for accessibility and technical feasibility.Those same layouts and assets extended into social sharing giving fans a polished way to share their creations with friends and followers.

Balancing Recognition With Brand Safety

Giving fans a way to create and share something of their own introduced another design challenge: how much freedom should the experience provide?Rather than relying on unrestricted imagery, we partnered with Global Bell Creative to develop artwork that let fans create something expressive while maintaining a consistent visual system.Fan Style names and shareable assets could still feel personal, but the overall experience remained recognizable as Taco Bell.

Designing for Recognition

Fan Style wasn't only about creation. The experience also explored how fans could be recognized for the things they made.Ultimately, Taco Bell gave fans the opportunity to have select Fan Styles considered for the national menu alongside other forms of recognition and rewards. The public launch also allowed Rewards members to earn points when other customers ordered their creations.That extended the experience beyond sharing for its own sake. A fan-created order could potentially inspire someone else to try it and even become part of Taco Bell itself.

From Fan Style to the National Menu

That promise eventually became real.Taco Bell reported more than 40,000 Fan Style submissions from which three fan-created items were ultimately selected for nationwide limited-time availability: the California Crunchwrap, Cantina Craze, and Burrito Bliss.The result created a connection between digital and physical experiences. Fans weren't only sharing what they made. Their creativity could influence what Taco Bell customers across the country could actually order.

Outcome

Fans created 40,000+ Fan Styles demonstrating how an everyday product behavior like customization could become something more expressive, shareable, and connected to the Taco Bell brand.Fan Style also received earned media coverage including Fast Company and People Magazine.Beyond the initial launch, the experience gave us a foundation for thinking more broadly about personalization, sharing, user-generated content, moderation, and fan participation within Taco Bell's digital products.

How This Shaped My Approach

Fan Style reinforced for me that some of the strongest digital experiences don't sit neatly within traditional product or brand boundaries.Creating something fans would want to personalize and share meant bringing together product design, brand expression, social behavior, technical realities, and safety considerations.It also strengthened how I work across disciplines bringing different teams together around a customer experience that needed to work as both a product and an expression of the brand.

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Exploring Explainable AI for Creative Workflows

Perception is an AI-powered color platform that helps designers discover palettes based on the feeling or idea they want to convey.Rather than starting with specific color values, designers could search by concept, explore related ideas, and use confidence scores to understand how closely different palettes aligned with their creative intent.The challenge wasn't simply generating colors with AI. It was exploring how AI could support creativity while still giving designers understanding and control.

Design Lead | 2023 - 2024

As Design Lead, I guided the product experience from early exploration through beta, working with Product, Engineering, Design, and Data Science to turn emerging AI capabilities into useful creative workflows for designers.

The Opportunity

How might we help designers explore color through meaning and emotion while making AI-generated results understandable enough to trust?

Inspired by Shigenobu Kobayashi's Color Image Scale, Perception explored the relationship between color, language, and emotion through emerging AI technology. Our Head of Design saw an opportunity to build on those principles while our data science team explored new ways to uncover relationships between color and meaning.The idea initially centered on helping people find colors that expressed the feeling they wanted for a brand or campaign. As the product evolved, we saw a more focused opportunity to help designers bridge the gap between creative intent and color selection.

Designing Around Creative Intent

I joined the project after early wireframes had been developed and helped guide the experience from those initial explorations through beta. Instead of requiring designers to begin with a specific color, Perception allowed them to start with what they wanted the color to communicate.Designers could enter a term, explore palettes associated with it, and discover related concepts to refine their direction.“What color am I looking for?” became “What do I want this to feel like?”

Making AI Easier to Understand

We didn't want Perception to feel like a black box that simply generated results. One way we approached explainability was through confidence scores. Results included a percentage showing how closely the system associated a palette with the concept being explored giving designers another signal they could use while evaluating different directions.This reinforced a principle that became important to my work on the product: AI should support creative judgment, not obscure it.

Testing with Designers

As Perception evolved, we began testing the experience with designers to understand how it could fit into their creative workflows.I helped develop the test, recruit participants, and identify the assumptions we wanted to validate. The study was still in progress when my involvement with the project ended so I wasn't part of the final analysis.

Designing for Growth

As Perception gained capabilities, our original single-surface experience became increasingly complex. More functionality gave designers more ways to work with color, but it also made the experience harder to understand.Rather than continuing to add controls to the same interface, we began organizing capabilities into more focused tools and reusable interaction patterns.Perception started evolving from one increasingly complicated interface into a connected suite of tools giving the product more room to grow as new capabilities emerged.

Extending Beyond the Standalone Product

We also partnered with Playbook as part of an effort to reach a broader creative audience.Playbook was building a space for teams to store, collaborate on, and share creative assets. We worked directly with their designers, developers, and leadership to explore how Perception could fit within their product and adjusted parts of our experience for that context.The partnership pushed my thinking beyond the standalone product toward how an experience could adapt within a broader creative ecosystem.

Outcome

Perception launched in beta in June 2023 and reached 10,000 users within six months.The product grew beyond its initial palette concept into a collection of AI-assisted color tools while the Playbook partnership gave us an opportunity to explore how Perception could extend into an established creative platform.

How This Shaped My Approach

Perception changed how I thought about designing for emerging technology. The interesting challenge wasn't just what AI could generate, but how people could understand, direct, and trust what it produced.It also pushed me to think beyond individual features toward systems that could evolve with both the technology and the people using it. Those lessons around product strategy, explainability, and systems thinking continue to influence how I approach product design.

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Designing Digital Safety Resources for a Global Audience

Meta Family Center is a global platform designed to help families navigate their online experiences through resources focused on digital well-being, safety, and privacy.The challenge was creating an experience that could make complex guidance easier to understand while supporting different levels of digital literacy, languages, cultures, and devices.

Design Lead | 2022 - 2023

As Design Lead, I helped shape the interaction and visual experience across desktop, tablet, and mobile web while developing reusable patterns that could support localization and continued global expansion.

The Opportunity

How might we empower families around the world to manage their online experiences through clear, accessible digital guidance?

Research showed that families came to the experience with very different levels of digital literacy. They were looking for clearer guidance around digital well-being, online safety, and privacy, while language and cultural differences created additional barriers to finding resources that felt relevant and understandable.Those needs shaped our approach from the beginning. Rather than designing around a single audience or market, we needed an experience that was clear enough to understand, flexible enough to localize, and structured enough to scale.

Making Complex Guidance Easier to Navigate

Digital safety can quickly become overwhelming particularly when people have different levels of familiarity with the subject.We focused on clear information hierarchies, step-by-step guidance, and progressive disclosure to make complex topics easier to navigate without presenting everything at once. The goal wasn't simply to organize information. It was to help families find the level of guidance they needed and move through it with greater confidence.

Designing for a Global Audience

Localization couldn't be something we considered only after finishing the English-language experience.We created reusable templates and flexible content patterns that could support multilingual content as Family Center expanded into additional markets. This meant thinking beyond individual screens and considering how the experience could remain understandable and consistent even as the content and language changed.The project expanded my definition of scale. A scalable experience isn't simply one that supports more content or users. It also needs to adapt without losing clarity.

Building a System That Could Evolve

Because Family Center needed to support a wide range of educational resources, designing every page independently wouldn't have been sustainable.We developed modular patterns that could be reused across different types of content while maintaining consistency throughout the experience. This gave the platform enough structure to feel cohesive while providing flexibility for new resources and content over time.The work pushed me to think less about individual pages and more about the underlying system connecting them.

Designing Through Technical Constraints

The design work was also happening alongside an accelerated platform transition which introduced additional technical and content constraints.I worked closely with Engineering and project partners to adapt the experience as the underlying systems changed while maintaining consistency across responsive layouts and Meta's broader design system. External content also needed to fit into the experience without making Family Center feel fragmented.These constraints made collaboration between Design, Engineering, and content partners especially important. The challenge wasn't simply getting designs shipped. It was preserving the quality and consistency of the experience while the platform underneath it was evolving.

From MVP to Global Rollout

Family Center went through multiple rounds of iteration before reaching a shippable MVP with the experience continuing to evolve as it expanded.What began with a more focused release eventually grew into a global platform making resources around digital well-being, safety, and privacy available to families across different markets and languages.

Outcome

Family Center reached approximately 500,000 visitors within its first week, 1 million within its first month, and 10 million by mid-2022. The experience continued expanding internationally and was available globally by early 2023.For me, that scale reinforced the importance of designing systems that could continue working as the audience, content, languages, and product evolved.

How This Shaped My Approach

Family Center expanded how I thought about designing for scale. Scale isn't only about supporting more users or adding more features. It can also mean creating an experience flexible enough to accommodate different languages, levels of digital literacy, content needs, and technical constraints without losing clarity.It also strengthened my systems thinking. Instead of approaching each screen as an isolated design problem, I became more deliberate about creating patterns that could continue working as the product, content, and audience evolved.

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Making Personal Finances Easier to Understand and Manage

Personal Finances was a new product for Experian Consumer Services designed to give people a clearer view of their financial lives in one place.By connecting their financial accounts, users could review transactions, understand their spending, receive alerts, and find guidance to help them make more informed decisions about their money.

Design Lead | 2020 – 2021

I joined Personal Finances after a contract designer had begun exploring the concept through early wireframes. As Design Lead, I took over the experience and helped guide it through product definition, interaction and visual design, prototyping, testing, iteration, and beta launch.I partnered with another product designer and worked closely with Product, Engineering, Research, Content, and Experian's internal creative agency to shape the experience across desktop, tablet, and mobile web.

The Opportunity

How might we create a financial tool that's unified, easy to use, and helps people feel more confident managing their money?

Research showed that managing finances could feel fragmented. People were navigating information across different accounts and services while looking for better ways to understand where their money was going.Our research highlighted three recurring needs: organization, financial understanding, and a greater sense of control. People wanted a more complete financial picture, but they also wanted an experience that could help them understand and act on what they were seeing.That gave us an opportunity to create something that went beyond displaying financial data and helped people feel a sense of empowerment.

Defining the Core Experience

When I joined, the product was still in an early stage with rough wireframes beginning to define what the experience could become. One of my first priorities was helping turn those explorations into a clearer end-to-end product experience.Research and competitive analysis helped us focus the experience around connecting financial accounts, viewing transactions in one place, understanding categorized spending, and receiving alerts about account activity.I developed task and user flows to map the journey from connecting an account and processing financial data through exploring the Personal Finances dashboard and individual transactions. Those flows gave the team a shared foundation for defining the MVP and moving into more detailed interaction and visual design.

Helping People Understand Their Spending

Bringing accounts together was only valuable if people could make sense of the information once it was there.We designed the experience around a consolidated view of transactions and spending categories allowing people to better understand where their money was going across connected accounts.We also explored contextual guidance within the experience so educational support could live closer to the financial information it related to. The goal was to make Personal Finances useful as both a financial overview and a tool for building greater financial understanding.

Learning Through Testing

Research remained part of the process as the product took shape.We tested an early experience with 12 participants across different credit segments and age groups. Participants responded positively to having their financial information brought together and highlighted the usefulness of seeing transactions, categorized spending, and alerts within the same experience.We continued testing more informally as the product evolved using real connected accounts to evaluate how accurately financial data and categories were represented.

Designing Around Real Financial Data

One of the biggest challenges emerged once we started working with real financial data.We partnered with Plaid so users could connect and sync their bank and credit card accounts with Personal Finances. As we tested the product internally, we looked closely at whether transactions and spending categories were coming through accurately.We found cases where transaction categories didn't match what users expected. Because those labels influenced how people understood their spending, inaccurate categorization could quickly make the experience less useful.We designed a feedback mechanism that allowed users to report inaccurate transaction labels and worked with Plaid to address categorization issues.That experience reinforced something I've carried into later work: in a financial product, trust isn't just about how the interface looks or behaves. It also depends on whether people can trust the data underneath it.

Designing Across Screens

Personal Finances needed to work consistently across desktop, tablet, and mobile web.I helped establish responsive patterns for the dashboard, transactions, spending information, and supporting content rather than treating each viewport as a separate experience.I also worked with Experian's internal creative team to bring supporting brand assets into the product while keeping the experience cohesive across devices.

From Concept to Beta

Over the course of more than a year, Personal Finances went through multiple rounds of wireframing, prototyping, testing, and refinement as we moved from early product exploration toward a shippable experience.What began as rough explorations evolved into a product that brought connected accounts, transaction management, spending categories, alerts, and financial guidance together within Experian Consumer Services.Personal Finances ultimately launched in beta.

Outcome

Personal Finances launched in beta, bringing connected accounts, spending insights, transaction management, alerts, and financial guidance together in one experience.During beta, the product grew to approximately:

The adoption and engagement reinforced the opportunity for Experian to expand beyond credit monitoring and give consumers a more holistic way to understand and manage their finances.

How This Shaped My Approach

Personal Finances strengthened how I think about designing products where clarity and trust are inseparable from usability.It also pushed me beyond individual screens toward the complete system behind an experience from research and information architecture to third-party services, data quality, and responsive behavior. Those lessons continue to influence how I approach complex, information-heavy products today.

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Designing a More Connected Taco Bell Experience

Fresco represents a major evolution of Taco Bell’s digital ordering experience bringing together ordering, personalization, loyalty, engagement, and brand expression within a more connected product ecosystem.My role has grown alongside the product. What began with designing individual experiences increasingly expanded into thinking across journeys, establishing reusable patterns, supporting implementation, and helping teams deliver a more cohesive experience.

Lead Product Designer | 2025 – 2026

As a Lead Product Designer, I’ve led experience design across Engagement while collaborating closely with Product, Engineering, Research, Analytics, Creative, Design System, and QA. My work has spanned experience direction, interaction and visual design, prototyping, documentation, implementation support, and visual QA.

The Opportunity

How might we create a more connected product experience while giving teams the flexibility to keep it evolving?

Fresco isn't a single feature or journey. Decisions in one part of the product can affect experiences elsewhere creating challenges around consistency, discoverability, customer expectations, and implementation.That shifted my focus beyond solving individual screens. I increasingly found myself thinking about how experiences connect, where existing patterns should be reused, where they needed to evolve, and how design decisions could hold together across a much larger product.

Designing Across an Ecosystem

Working across Fresco meant balancing the needs of individual experiences with the larger product around them.Across areas such as personalization, loyalty, engagement, and ordering, I worked with partners across disciplines to make sure new experiences felt connected rather than isolated.The goal wasn't to make everything behave identically. It was to create enough consistency that customers could understand the product while leaving room for different experiences to solve different needs.

Creating Patterns That Could Scale

As Fresco evolved, I became increasingly focused on identifying where one-off solutions could become reusable patterns.That meant thinking beyond the immediate feature to define interaction behavior, edge cases, documentation, and guidance that other designers and partners could build on.Motion became one example of this evolution. What began as experimentation with individual experiences eventually led to clearer guidance around how creative assets should be designed, handed off, tested, and implemented across Product Design, Creative, and Engineering.

Taking Design Beyond the Handoff

Fresco also changed how I think about when design work is finished.As experiences moved into development, I stayed involved through implementation and visual QA, working with cross-functional partners to identify gaps between design intent and what was being built.That work helped create tighter feedback loops between Design, Engineering, Product, and QA while also revealing opportunities to improve our specifications, patterns, and handoff processes.For me, the important shift was from thinking about delivering designs to thinking about delivering experiences.

Evolving Through Evidence

As the product matured, I also worked more closely with Research and Analytics to bring additional evidence into design conversations.Rather than relying on design intuition alone, I increasingly approached questions by considering what customer research, behavioral data, technical constraints, and design exploration could each tell us.That helped me bring a more informed perspective to ambiguous product problems while keeping design grounded in the actual customer experience.

Outcome

Fresco has become one of the most significant products I've worked on both in its scale and in the breadth of collaboration required to bring it to life.My contribution has extended beyond individual features into the patterns, documentation, implementation support, and cross-functional collaboration that help a large product experience remain coherent as it evolves.

How This Shaped My Approach

Fresco has changed how I think about the role of a Lead Product Designer.I've remained close to the craft, but my contribution has increasingly expanded beyond the screens themselves: connecting decisions across experiences, bringing clarity to ambiguous problems, creating reusable guidance, supporting implementation, and helping teams work through complexity together.For me, design leadership has become less about personally solving every problem and more about helping create the conditions for strong product experiences to happen consistently.

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Balancing Performance, Storytelling, and Conversion at Scale

A global redesign of the Facebook Portal site focused on modernizing product storytelling while improving navigation and media performance to drive engagement and conversion.

Leadership Scope

The Opportunity

How might we modernize the Portal experience to improve storytelling and usability while supporting performance and conversion goals?

Approach

Key Decisions

Outcome

Scaling Impact

Established reusable patterns for media, layout, and promotional components that allowed the site to evolve with changing business needs.

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Hi, I’m Elliot.

I’m a Lead Product Designer based in Southern California. I enjoy taking complex, sometimes messy problems and turning them into experiences that feel clear, thoughtful, and built to last at industry-leading companies.

My background spans personalization, AI-driven tools, and large-scale digital products. I’ve worked across industries and alongside Product, Engineering, Research, Marketing, and other partners to figure out not only what we should build, but why it matters and how it fits into the bigger picture.Over time, I’ve become especially interested in the space between design and strategy: bringing people together around a direction, making sense of ambiguity, and creating systems that teams can continue building on.

Capabilities

Product strategy · Interaction design · Visual systems · Design systems · Prototyping · Research synthesis · Cross-functional collaboration

Tools & Technology

Figma · Adobe Creative Cloud · AI tools · HTML/CSS

Partnerships

I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with some great external teams along the way. These partnerships have brought new perspectives and expertise into the products I’ve helped shape.

My path into design hasn’t exactly been a straight line and I think that’s made me a better designer.Outside of work, I’ve run full marathons, traveled extensively, and spent time living abroad. Those experiences have made me more curious, adaptable, and comfortable navigating the unknown. These are qualities that tend to show up in how I approach design too.These days, I’m interested in growing beyond designing individual experiences and spending more time shaping direction, mentoring others, and helping teams solve bigger problems together.

A few kind words

Annette Rodriguez Chang
Cox Automotive,
Principal Product Manager

"Elliot has a great eye for design and paying close attention to detail. Dedicated and passionate about his work and listening to users. Always collaborates with stakeholders, circles back to research insights, asks questions, and seeks clarification.”

Jennifer Mansdorf
Kelley Blue Book,
User Experience Design Manager

"Elliot is one of those rare well-rounded folks... His strong work ethic, dependability, and attention to detail make him an asset to any team.”

Warren TsangExperian Consumer Services,
Lead Product Designer

"If you're looking for a really experienced, professional and dependable designer… He learns new things easily, takes initiative, provides thought leadership and is a consummate professional. Plus he's an enjoyable, positive person to interact with that can really raise a team's culture with his example.”

Thanks for taking the time to explore my portfolio.

If you're interested in collaboration or have questions, feel free to reach out. I look forward to connecting with you.

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How I Work

I like bringing clarity to messy problems.My process changes depending on the challenge, but I generally start by understanding what we're trying to solve, align people around a direction, and design with the bigger system in mind. The goal isn't just to ship something that works today. It's to create something the team can continue building on.

Research & Discovery

Before jumping into solutions, I try to understand the problem from different angles.That means aligning with partners on what we're trying to accomplish, looking at what we already know from research and data, and identifying the questions we still need to answer. Sometimes that leads to research. Sometimes the evidence is already there.The important part is making sure we're solving the right problem before getting too attached to a solution.

Conceptualization

Once the problem is clear enough, I start exploring how the experience could work.I collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, and other partners to understand constraints, pressure-test ideas, and find a direction we believe can scale.I'm less interested in producing dozens of concepts than finding the few that help us learn something and move the conversation forward.

Iterative Design

I rarely think of a design as finished after the first pass.Feedback, research, technical discoveries, edge cases, and sometimes simply seeing something built can change the direction. I use those moments to refine the experience while looking for patterns we can reuse elsewhere.The result is often bigger than an individual screen or flow. It's a stronger system for whatever comes next.

Delivery & Scaling

Shipping is part of the design process.I stay involved as ideas move into development working through behaviors, edge cases, documentation, and the inevitable questions that surface once something becomes real.I'm always thinking about what happens after launch too: what we learn, what needs refinement, and what can become a reusable pattern rather than a one-off solution.

Perspective & Influence

Some of how I work has less to do with design.I've run full marathons, traveled extensively, and lived abroad. Those experiences taught me quite a bit about patience, curiosity, adapting when things don't go according to plan, and becoming comfortable with not having all the answers.I bring a lot of that same perspective to design: stay curious, listen closely, keep moving, and be willing to change course when you learn something new.

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