Me, in summary
My last name Nakawatase is pronounced
"knock-uh-watt-uh-say”
Synthesizing data from user interviews to create goal based personas
Me (middle front) with some of my students after playing my most successful game, Chalkboard MarioKart.
UX thus far
My career as a UX designer began in 2015. I’ve been able to leverage my education and experiences to create clear, concise content and strategically empathize with users. I worked at NailSnaps, where I was employee #1. Together, we won two UX awards, winning Most Fun and Creative UX Driven Product and beating out long established companies like SAP and Google for IxDA 2016’s Peoples’ Choice.
I then jumped into the fire hose of designing identity and access management tools for thousands of users. In this new world of on-prem enterprise security software, I was responsible for creating a consistent and usable end-user experience across all of SecureAuth’s products. I also led our user research, testing designs with users, creating test scripts, and interviewing specialized users.
From 2019 to 2024, I worked as the sole designer for Expel’s Managed Phishing Service, and got the opportunity to join that team in its infancy. I set the design foundations for the service and designed for both internal security analysts and external customer users from workflows to dashboards. I also set the foundations for our user research practice and along with another designer, helped to successfully advocate for the adoption of a reusable component design system.
I have a strong interest in DesignOps and played an active role in iterating on our UX team practices, trying to solve for the problem on having consistent design output and meaningful peer-to-peer feedback as the team scaled.
Before UX
I have a degree in Linguistics from UCLA. My studies involved looking at complex data sets and finding patterns to elegantly describe semantics, phonology, and trying to recreate dead languages from existing languages.
I taught English as a second language in Japan for two years, where I collaborated with other instructors and designed and iterated on activities to the varying skill levels of my 1300 students. It combined both my passion for linguistics and creative problem solving, but I ultimately left knowing that teaching was not for me.
In my free time enjoy sewing. I made my wedding reception dress and am currently honing my coat-making skills!
Illustration of a person using a sword to kill a man. Another illustration below of a person killing a man who is holding a sword.
Linguistics fun
"You killed a man with a sword,” has two different meanings.
They are: "You used a sword to kill a man," and "You killed a man who was holding a sword." The difference between these two utterances would be obvious if you looked at their syntactic structures.
Here's a harder one with no syntactic difference: "Every man loves a woman," has two different meanings. What are they? Even harder still, what are the five meanings of "Every owner of a siamese cat loves a therapist"? (*ahemhem*)