Most Daring Thing I've Done:

  • Rappelling down 200 ft waterfalls in Costa Rica. 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, or traveling the world.

Hi, I'm Becka.

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

I grew up in California and then went north to study Psychology at the University of British Columbia, graduating with a BA in Psychology in 2010.

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.

Tradecraft is a 12-week immersive boot camp for traction roles: Sales/ BD, Growth, and UX Design. 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!

And it doesn't end there. 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 that embodies tech in Silicon Valley. 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. At T3 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. I discovered a profound appreciation for remote work, which removes me from the distractions of an office and enables me to work from environments that most stimulate me.

So naturally, I moved to GitLab, a fully remote company since 2012, and one that actually holds itself accountable for living up to its values of Collaboration, Results, Efficiency, Diversity, Inclusion, & Belonging, and Transparency. I’m a Senior Product Designer on the Govern: Threat Insights team which focuses on GitLab’s application security features. I was the first designer to create an experience for a security scanner configuration UI, which other groups have since adopted. I contribute daily to our Vulnerability Management features, including triaging security vulnerabilities in the UI, security dashboards, how developers and security engineers collaborate on keeping their applications safe, and policy creation to make the scanning and triaging workflow more manageable. Every designer at GitLab is also responsible for contributing to our quarterly UX OKRs and to Pajamas, our design system. I’m a research-focused designer who designs for long-term ideal solutions without compromising MVCs and iterative steps to get there while conducting problem and solution validation testing along the way.

Reach out if I can be of service to the UX/ UI needs of your product or service.