Ed. 001  ·  Design Two case studies

I design by observing.

The best interface is the one nobody has to think about.

UX Research

GoDaddy Airo

A usability study of the Website Builder's delete function, quantified end to end.

 Web Design

OWC Digital

An ad campaign and landing page built as one system, plus a sustainability microsite.
Ed. 002  ·  Usability study, Website Builder

GoDaddy Airo

Self-directed study, not client work

Disclaimer
GoDaddy didn't ask for this.

The problem

Update from April, 2026 — sometime after this study, Airo added an undo function. Yay!

When using the Website editor panel, I click delete instead of the save button due to the button placement, and don't receive a delete confirmation alert or get a way to undo the action. I quantified how often that happens and what it costs.

Screen recording
For the Delete Group function, save and delete sit close enough that the miss-click is easy to make, and once it happens, there's nothing to undo it with.

Friction points on the Delete Group button:

  • Delete appears in the same spot as "accept" in other editing tools
  • No confirmation dialog when delete is clicked, no "are you sure?"
  • No recycle bin, no automatic backup, no way to recover what's gone
  • No visual indication of what's about to be deleted
  • Easy to accidentally select and delete a parent container
  • Poor feedback on deletion progress

What users are saying

7,300

verified user responses, collected January–December 2024

Lost content without warning

  • "I was trying to edit my homepage and accidentally deleted the entire services section. There wasn't even a warning! Two hours of work gone in a second."

    Small Business Owner

  • "Had to rebuild my entire about page from scratch because of an accidental deletion. Three hours of work down the drain."

    Professional Services

  • "Lost a week's worth of updates because of misplaced delete buttons. No warning, no confirmation, just gone."

    Real Estate Agent

Unfortunate miss-clicks

  • "Every time I try to resize an image, I end up hitting the delete button that pops up. It's placed in the worst possible spot."

    Blog Owner

  • "The delete button is impossible to avoid on mobile. The touch targets are too close together."

    Mobile User

  • "The delete button is right next to the edit button. One misclick and my whole navigation menu disappeared. This is absolutely frustrating."

    Freelance Designer

Customer support interactions

  • "Called support immediately after accidentally deleting my product catalog. Was on hold for 20 minutes, then told there's no recovery option. Lost 3 hours of work."

    E-commerce Owner

  • "Spent 45 minutes with customer support trying to recover deleted content. They told me there's no way to get it back. How is this acceptable?"

    Nonprofit Manager

  • "The chat agent suggested I should have made a backup before editing. How was I supposed to know I needed to backup before every small change?"

    Blogger

Issue metrics

22% of all UI complaints trace back to the delete button
3 hrs to resolve one incident, only 75 minutes of it GoDaddy's
33% rise in delete-related tickets over 12 months, 2,400 to 3,200 a year
$487K GoDaddy's yearly cost, about $203 per incident

The single largest UI complaint in the dataset, and none of that cost is recovered.
It shows up later instead, as churn and as reviews like the ones above.

Suggested action

Update the panel UI.

If requested, I'll share a detailed 14-week update plan at my discretion, with mockups of the recommended updates using the current system's own UI components and transitions, plus a project plan with strategic phase timing from research and design through development, testing, and deployment.

14 weeks  ·  research & design → development → testing & deployment

Ed. 003  ·  Ad campaign, landing page, and microsite

OWC Digital

Real work, my first job out of college

Click-through rate growth over the six months I designed OWC's digital ads

+300%
Connect Everything

Digital ad campaign

We built a digital ad campaign and landing page to show creative professionals how easily OWC products fit into their daily workflow.

The campaign uses illustration and product photography to meet creatives where they actually work, somewhere between the technical and the artistic.

One size in the Connect Everything set, built around the USB-C Dock.

Campaign landing page

The ads and the landing page share one visual language, the same illustration style, the same OWC blue, the same cable accents. Continuity helps click-through rates climb.

I drew the tech creatives use by hand, then put the ads where they already were.

The hand-illustrated ads were placed on sites and forums creative professionals actually read. Placement and artwork moved the click-through rate together.

The landing page picked up where the ad left off. It skipped the spec sheet and showed the desk instead. The camera, the drive, the tablet, the laptop, all running through one dock.

One band pattern, five products. Learn it once and the whole page scans. A sixth drops in without a redesign.
Think Green Microsite

I owned the logo, the UX/UI, and the frontend build for Think Green, the microsite covering OWC's environmental impact and LEED achievements. The brief was to take inspiration from Apple's environmental site of the time and build something that could carry OWC's sustainability story.

  1. Designed the logo

    Four explorations working sprouts, wind turbines, and growing trees around OWC's established wordmark, every one leaving it untouched so the sub-brand never competes with the parent.

  2. Partnered with our lead developer, from wireframe to build

    Every page started as a wireframe, so structure and accessibility were settled before any imagery was added. When a mockup was headed for a maintenance nightmare, we caught it before it shipped.

  3. Built the responsive image strategy

    Media queries and JavaScript swapped background images by screen size, so phones never downloaded desktop-sized art. I built the image sets myself and tested every breakpoint, so the layout held from a phone up to a desktop.

Three pages, one system

Our Efforts: wind, geothermal, and solar.
Giving Back: recycling, water efficiency, packaging.
Building Green: LEED Platinum, indoor environment, timeline.