Designing products that earn trust.

I'm Yaya, a product designer based in Ottawa. I design AI products for high-stakes contexts—decision-support tools, oversight interfaces, and agents that have to know when to step back. My work sits at the layer where AI meets human accountability, which means most of it is about restraint: what the system shouldn't do, what it has to make legible, and where the person is still the one who has to defend the call.

The throughline is structural clarity. Making uncertainty visible instead of implied. Designing friction that prevents the wrong decision instead of dressing up the right one. Treating accountability as a load-bearing part of the interface, not a compliance footnote. The contexts vary (civic AI, fintech, productivity) but the discipline is the same.

I work fluently with AI as a build collaborator. WorkMap was developed end-to-end in React. The Check-In Agent runs on a system-prompted Claude endpoint I designed and wrote. I think out loud about the practice in Working Notes. Outside of design, I host philosophy cafés, haunt bookshops, and think about sunny beach days more than is probably warranted.