danowens.com
Product & interaction design for complex systems at scale
I design user-facing experiences for large, regulated organizations where legacy systems, compliance and operational reality shape what’s possible.
Increasingly, that work extends beyond individual projects into design systems and AI-assisted workflows, when consistency and coordination become the real bottlenecks.
I’ve spent my career working on mass-market financial products at Wells Fargo, Bank of the West, Bank of America and E*TRADE.
What I do
My work typically involves
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Simplifying complex, multi-system interactions without losing important detail
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Designing for edge cases, not just happy paths
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Creating interaction patterns that scale across products and teams
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Translating organizational constraints into usable interfaces
In recent years, I’ve been spending more time on system-level questions
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How design systems succeed or fail inside large organizations
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Where manual review and coordination don’t scale
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How AI can assist with consistency, documentation and drift detection without replacing human judgment
This work complements my product design background rather than replacing it.
Selected work and patterns
Over time, I’ve found that the most persistent design problems tend to show up at two different scales:
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Helping users make sense of complex systems
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Helping organizations keep those systems coherent over time