Places I’ve lived:

  • Northampton, MA

  • Long Beach, CA

  • San Francisco, CA

  • Paris, France (for 3 months!)

  • Vancouver, BC

  • Austin, TX

  • Chicago, IL

  • Portland, OR (current) 🌲

Most Daring Thing I've Done:

  • Rappelling down 200 ft waterfalls in Costa Rica or skydiving over Sacramento, CA. Keep in mind I have an extreme fear of heights!

Weirdest Thing I've Done:

  • I volunteered for Mythbusters as a zombie for their Walking Dead special. For 10 hours I zombie shuffled around a cold, empty warehouse in Vallejo. Adam Savage even killed me with a giant foam axe!

When I'm Not Working You Can Find Me:

  • At the park with my dog, biking around the city, trying out a new restaurant, at a museum or movie theater, picking up some new hobby (gardening, crocheting), appreciating art at design stores or walking the streets taking photos of murals, painting, playing board games or cards, volunteering with animals, or hiking.

New obsession:

  • Playing Split Fiction with my fiancé. Such a creative and fantastical world we get to play and solve puzzles in together! Kudos to the team at Hazelight Studios. 🙇‍♀️

Hi, I'm Becka.

[And that's my dog Percy in the tux. he's always outdressing me.]

I’m a research-oriented designer who designs for long-term ideal solutions while always finding space for MVCs and iterative steps to get there. My strengths are creating roadmaps and considering strategy with my PMs and Product leadership, gathering context about user problems, understanding both user flows (or JTBDs) as well as business needs, requirements, and technical constraints, doing competitive analyses and design explorations, conducting problem and solution validation testing, iterating on designs, and then collaborating closely with engineering during implementation and QA. Another important skill that I bring to the table is learning about other teams who are working on similar initiatives, so we can work more efficiently and help each other out through transparency and collaboration. Finally, AI is evolving every day and almost every single day I’m learning new ways to incorporate AI into my processes and into our user experiences in the product.

Let’s back up. How did I get here?

I grew up in California and then went north to study Psychology at the University of British Columbia, graduating with a BA in Psychology.

I went back to the beloved Bay Area and fell into Event Planning. From this I realized I was most interested in the experience of events in designing the user -ahem- attendee flow from the start of the event through to the end. I also loved Event Design, which led me into my first career shift and into Interior Architecture and Design (IAD). 

While I was earning my BFA2 in IAD at the Academy of Art University, I started working for startups on the side to keep myself financially afloat. These startups included big names in tech, such as AngelList, Udemy, and HotelTonight (since acquired by AirBnb). Through my multi-dimensional experience as Event Planner/ Recruiter/ Office Manager/ Interior Designer/ Culture Creator at these startups, I realized my hidden love for this exciting world of innovation and disruption, and how it could reach so many parts of the world through the internet. Was there a way to blend my love of design with my love of psychology in this fabulous world of technology? 

Enter Tradecraft, a 12-week immersive boot camp. Under the tutelage of some of the best and brightest mentors in UX, we practiced User Research, Usability Testing, Service Design, Interface and Interaction Design, Product Design, and design thinking every day. We made personas, user flows, heuristic evaluations, and more which you can see in my work in this portfolio. My proudest moment came when one of the first companies I worked with, Refresh, was acquired by LinkedIn in 2014!

Tradecraft gave us so much more than technical skills. We had interpersonal communication exercises and immersive emotional intelligence workshops led by the creators of "Touchy Feely" from the MBA program at Stanford University. We learned how we can contribute to the pay-it-forward community, and, of course, I fell in love (practically at first sight) with UX.

My journey then led me from Tradecraft to a few freelance positions at early-stage startups, and then to T3, a design agency based in Austin, TX, where I worked on projects for big-name clients- UPS, 7- Eleven, General Mills' Box Tops for Education, NRG, Pega, Allstate Insurance- as a User Experience Designer. 

From there I went onto Rackspace where I got to work on a range of amazingly complex problems, from the internal (employee-facing) and external (customer-facing) ticketing systems and creating and organizing a new design system, to facilitating research sessions and redesigning the account management, navigation, and IA of our customer portals. 

In 2019 I was lucky enough to land a role at GitLab, a fully remote company since 2012, and one that actually holds itself accountable for living up to its values of Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity, Inclusion, & Belonging, and Transparency. GitLab is an open-source code repository and collaborative software development DevSecOps platform. I’m a Senior Product Designer in the Secure section on the Security Insights team, which focuses on GitLab’s application security and vulnerability management features. I think a lot about how developers and security engineers collaborate on keeping their applications safe, and policy creation to scale and automate the scanning and triaging workflow. I was the first designer to create an experience for a security scanner configuration UI, which other groups have since adopted. I’m currently leading the design and validation for a new security dashboard, which has received praise from customers so far. Here’s an actual quote from a Sr Solutions Architect at GitLab as of May 2025:

I'd like to give a huge shoutout to the whole team involved in upgrading the security dashboards. You are consistently delivering impressive results and they generate a lot of satisfaction to the customers seeing these changes coming! We were in a meeting with one of our customers this Monday, with @Becka Lippert and [the PM] to show what we are doing. The company’s tech leader was very impressed and grateful to see that GitLab is listening to them and improving here! He shared our designs with the group CISO who echoed the thanks.

Every designer at GitLab is also responsible for contributing to our stage vision and strategy, including collaboration on our product roadmaps, and to Pajamas, our design system, where we keep accessibility at the forefront of what we do.

Reach out if you think my skills may be aligned to the design of your product or service!