For eight years I've worked on the unglamorous side of retail — the tools associates use to price products, track purchase orders, pick grocery orders, and keep merchandise safe. Not the app you shop with. The app the person in the back of the store is using while you shop.
It's a good place to be a designer. The users are experts, they're under real time pressure, and they are ruthless: if your tool is slower than the spreadsheet they built themselves, they will use the spreadsheet. You find out very quickly whether your design actually works.
I start by assuming I've been handed the wrong problem.Not out of contrarianism — it's just usually true. At The Home Depot I was asked to modernize the UI of one purchase-order tracking tool. By the end of the research I'd found six more tools of the same kind, no one who could explain why they existed separately, and division managers spending ninety minutes a day manually forwarding filtered spreadsheets. The UI was never the problem. We rewrote the scope and became a data platform team instead of a reporting team.
I draw to think.When a workflow spans a store aisle, a walk-in fridge, a delivery truck, and three teams who've never met each other, an illustration gets everyone to the same picture faster than a spec does. I've used it to explain the grocery fulfillment flow to engineers who'd never set foot in a store, and to show business partners what their own associates actually do all day. It's the most reliable alignment tool I have.
I don't run a fixed process.The double diamond is a useful sketch, and every project I've had has needed its own shape. What doesn't change is that research decides which questions are worth asking, and that nothing is ever finished — products keep moving whether or not anyone's designing for them.
New: I've started building what I design.Over the last two years I've been shipping production front-end alongside the design work, using AI-assisted tooling to move faster. It's collapsed the distance between a concept and a thing that exists, and it's made me a considerably better partner to engineers.
For almost five years I ran an illustration account, @ToriLabs — an imaginary creature I drew as a way of passing along a bit of lightness. It reached about four thousand followers before I stepped back two years ago, when AI-generated art arrived on the platform in volume with no safeguards for authorship.
I'm not sentimental about the tools. I use AI every day to build, and it's made me faster and more capable. But I think there's a real difference between a tool that helps a person make something and a system that launders other people's work without their name on it. Watching that happen to a community I was part of is a large part of why I care as much as I do about authorship, credit, and doing the work honestly.