Hello, I'm Patrick Gonet.

I'm a software product designer.

I'm learning truesight.

I'm obsessed with interfaces, and how evolving the design of a system can help secure the outcome that the system is meant to realize.

That means I spend most of my professional life thinking about how to build, measure, and learn.

So, why truesight?

In Dungeons and Dragons, Truesight is an attribute that lets creatures see clearly in both darkened and magically obscured environments.

For much of my career, I've worked on sensitive systems for analysts and technicians that perform their work on disconnected or encrypted systems.

That means that a lot of the tools available to "normal" product designers (user metrics like clickthrough and conversion rates, live A+B testing via managed Beta deployments, etc) simply aren't available to me.

So I've had to learn to learn how to talk to users, develop an understanding of their workflows and goals, and build software without those sorts of insights, then speak directly to users to course-correct when (inevitably) I get some of it wrong along the way.

One big problem with working in this field is. . . it doesn't tend to result in the sort of products that one can right click > export to .png

So I hope you'll bear with me as my portfolio is a bit unorthodox.

The design portfolio contains some of the (very few) sharable artifacts about specific design work that I can provide on the open internet.

The leadership vignettes convey a handful of the most important lessons I've learned about advocating for design and leading designers, since for a few years I was working in a design director capacity (as well as lead UX research designer for innovation work) for a place called Kessel Run.

A note about content:

I most recently updated this portfolio when I was still working in my design director role, and so it's heavily focused on leadership elements right now.

I am back to working as a Principal UX/UI Designer now (and really enjoying it). But it's still an obscured product, so there's a very limited amount of stuff I can share.

Curious to know more about me? Poke around. And feel free to send me questions if you want more information!