Hi, there!
I'm Daniela, a product designer with a not so typical path. I started in Finance and Real Estate, where I learned how business works from the inside out, then brought that lens to product design: turning complex, high-stakes systems into things people can actually understand and trust.
The journey
Feb 2024 - Present
Product Designer · Groundfloor
Product design for a private-markets investing platform used by everyday investors, loans, notes, and a growing set of alternative offerings. This is where research, AI-assisted prototyping, and fintech complexity all became one practice instead of three separate skills.
Jul 2023 - Feb 2024
Jr. Mobile Designer · Groundfloor
Mobile investing experience during a period when the company pushed toward a simpler, app-first path into real-estate-backed private markets.
Nov 2022 - Jun 2023
Contract Design Work · Moment Studio
Client work across a B2B fintech back office platform and a career-platform product, leading a team of five on one of the engagements. Early career work that taught me how to design inside someone else's constraints, brand, timeline, stakeholders, all fixed.
Jan 2019 - Sep 2022
Real Estate Closing Specialist · Browne and Price PA
Title research and closing documents for dozens of properties a month. The origin story: watching how much of money's complexity is actually just bad information design, and deciding to go fix that instead.
How I work
Research before conviction.
I don't trust my first read of a problem, including my own. On the Invest Page redesign, my first pass at the checkout data said one thing; a deeper cut said the opposite. I'd rather find that out before I design than after I ship.
Two perspectives beat one confident one.
Testing across cohorts, one familiar with the product, one not, turns “five people got confused” into “five people with nothing else in common got confused the same way.” That's a much harder finding to argue with, and a much safer one to design against.
Alignment is part of the design work, not a delay to it.
On the Reporting Redesign, the real problem wasn't the interface, it was that marketing, product, and leadership were telling three different stories to the same confused investor. Getting them into one room and one story came before a single screen got designed.
Prototype to test behavior, not to impress a stakeholder.
I build working prototypes, often now with Claude Code, specifically so people can click through a real interaction instead of imagining one from a static comp. If the question is “can someone actually find this,” a flat mockup can't answer it.
Beyond the screen
I make digital art about the mundane things in my life, and colored pencil art. Outside of that, you'll usually find me hanging out with my two very spoiled cats, Mochi and Lupe.
Click a piece to see it larger.