Product designer / systems thinker

Mara Ellison

I make complex digital products easier to understand, use and improve.

Based in the Pacific time zone Open to thoughtful product teams

01 / Profile

Useful clarity, from first question to final detail.

I am a product designer with a background in content design and service mapping. My work sits where product strategy, interaction design and plain language meet. I help teams turn tangled journeys into calm, testable experiences that people can move through with confidence.

02 / Selected work

A few problems worth solving.

Northstar / onboarding for a climate platform

2024–25

Product direction · UX writing · Prototyping

Reframed a technical setup journey around the decisions new customers actually needed to make, then gave the team a reusable pattern for explaining system status.

Common Thread / care coordination service

2023–24

Service design · Research synthesis · Workshop facilitation

Mapped the handoffs between families, providers and support staff to reveal where information was being lost, and shaped a simpler shared record concept.

Field Notes / internal knowledge tool

2022–23

Interaction design · Design systems · Content model

Designed a flexible editorial workflow for a distributed operations team, balancing fast capture with the structure needed for reliable retrieval later.

03 / Experience

Recent chapters.

Senior Product Designer, Lumen Works

2022–Present

Remote · Product design team

Lead discovery and end-to-end design for workflow products used by operational teams.
Partner with product and engineering leads to make ambiguous work concrete and shippable.

UX Designer, Alder & Co.

2019–2022

Portland · Digital consultancy

Delivered research, content and interaction design across public-interest and B2B projects.
Introduced lightweight critique rituals that made decisions easier to see and revisit.