Jesse J.
Anderson

Wavepal is a social CRM designed to help people maintain meaningful relationships without guilt or pressure.

Before building anything, we ran a comprehensive survey that confirmed people universally struggle with staying connected, and existing tools were failing them. User interviews revealed that most relationship apps feel like work and get abandoned quickly.

It also highlighted users' largest pain points:

• forgetting to reach out
• forgetting important details about people's lives
• not knowing what to say when they do reach out

We started by building a minimal MVP focused solely on helping people remember to reach out and making that effortless. Our design approach was intentionally minimal to allow for rapid iteration and pivoting when needed.

I designed both web and mobile MVPs and conducted several UX interviews with early users to see how they use the MVP and further refine the product to better suit user needs.

ADHD Motivation Mastery is a comprehensive online video course teaching people with ADHD how to work with their unique motivation patterns.

I created the curriculum for 30 videos across 7 modules, designed the marketing website, created on-screen graphics and motion design for all video content, and printable worksheets and templates.

For the marketing website, I created a single-page site with clear visual hierarchy and progressive disclosure of details. It uses encouraging, optimistic language and validation throughout to acknowledge the real struggles faced by the target audience: adults with ADHD.

I also created supplemental course materials: downloadable worksheets and a motivation playbook that students could use alongside the videos.

My challenge for this project was to rebuild the Symbolic.ai editor from scratch using React/TypeScript with TipTap/ProseMirror and updating the design to be more user-friendly, while maintaining all existing functionality and continuing to ship new AI features.

The project required custom implementations for nearly everything: AI text generation, fact auditing, spell checking, collaborative highlights, author vs. AI tracking, and version control.

For this project, we needed to maintain backwards compatibility with existing documents, provide a smooth migration path, and keep shipping AI features during the rebuild. Rather than attempting one large rewrite, I designed a four-phase rollout strategy to balance technical risk with user value.

Each phase was carefully scoped to deliver meaningful improvements that we could ship while maintaining stability. I worked closely with our product team to prioritize features based on user feedback and technical dependencies.

I was the project lead and collaborated with other engineers on the backend technical implementation while I primarily focused on frontend and UX design.

The result was a reliable, feature-rich editor that significantly improved the product's core value proposition while establishing patterns for future collaborative features.

I wrote Extra Focus: The Quick Start Guide to Adult ADHD for adults with ADHD seeking practical, actionable strategies that work with their unique brain. Beyond authoring the book, I designed the visual identity across multiple formats: cover design, interior layout in Adobe InDesign, and marketing website. I also collaborated with illustrator Nate Kadlac for book illustrations to visualize concepts.

The cover design needed to stand out in Amazon thumbnails while conveying professionalism and hope. I chose a bold, orange color palette and typography to stand out among other ADHD books which typically used muted colors and clinical fonts. The interior layout prioritized ADHD-friendly formatting with generous white space, short paragraphs, and visual breaks to prevent overwhelm for ADHD readers.

For the marketing website, I built a single-page site using Next.js that showcased the book and made it easy to purchase from all retailers. The site includes book overview, praise from notable figures, interior previews, testimonials, author bio, and media kit.

Planning Center Resources (as it was originally called) began as a basic facilities management tool for tracking equipment, rooms, and their availability. Over six years, I led design in the product evolution that transformed it into Planning Center Calendar, a comprehensive church-wide event calendar with full event management functionality, conflict resolution, and cross-product integrations. This wasn't a single redesign but a thoughtful progression of improvements that fundamentally shifted how churches manage their events.

We started by modernizing the Rooms and Resources interface, borrowing design patterns from Planning Center Services (Planning Center's flagship product), to introduce inline editing with automatic saving. We also added crucial tracking fields churches needed: photo uploads for equipment condition, location tracking, and asset management features.

A major redesign consolidated event management onto a single page. As a product team, we established a guiding principle to remove steps rather than add them, making all common actions visible or one click away. We designed a tabbed interface (Overview for scheduling, Activity for audit trails, Details for additional event context and settings) with an inline search-based booking interface and color-coded approval statuses. This became the foundation for future feature development of event management.

We also designed a conflict resolution system that maintained transparency while giving staff flexibility to share rooms with other events in certain cases. We introduced a designated permissions role for members who could resolve conflicts by choosing which event had priority.

Following this, we designed a brand new calendar view with advanced filtering and tagging capabilities. Previously, the calendar was a minor, non-interactive sidebar element used to view events. We repositioned it front-and-center, making it the primary interface for event management and making it fully featured and interactive. We also replaced rigid folders with flexible tag groups, and added advanced filtering by rooms, resources, departments, approval status, and more. We also added the ability to create event templates for commonly recurring events.

Throughout these iterations, I collaborated closely with our product manager on design decisions and worked with our development team to ensure everything integrated smoothly with Planning Center's broader system. The frontend was built primarily in React with CSS-in-JS styled components on a Ruby on Rails backend.

Planning Center Check-Ins helps churches track attendance and print name labels for children and volunteers. When I joined the project, the app was barely a year old and the primary screen was a single-page dashboard. This worked great at launch but began to feel more and more constrained as we iterated on the product and added more features. I led an events page redesign to give us more space to growing the app and to make information easier to scan at a glance. We moved from a single dashboard view to a full-page view with dedicated side navigation giving us room to add features and further evolve the product.

I also created a set of progressive icons as part of the dashboard refresh with a more fun, illustrated vibe as we worked to make Check-Ins feel more vibrant and playful—appropriate for a kid check-in app. I also led design for the headcounts feature, which let churches track attendance without individual check-ins. The frontend was built with HTML, CSS/Sass, CoffeeScript, and vanilla JavaScript on a Ruby on Rails backend.