Micah Fenner

Designing products, strategies, pixels, and teams

I'm a Design Manager at Plaid, where I'm helping our European teams to create the building blocks for fintech in the EU and UK. Before that, I was designing at Asana and Apple.

Principles

  • Everyone should be able to enjoy great design. And I mean everyone. The young, the elderly, those with accessibility needs, and yes, even enterprise users.
  • Fitts's Law is king. More broadly, we should never ignore the research-backed fundamentals that form the foundation of good UX practices.
  • Physical > digital. We should be creating digital experiences that add meaning to our physical lives and make them easier, not get in the way.
  • Attention is a valuable resource. Technology should only demand our attention when absolutely necessary.
  • Design work is never complete and we are never done learning. We should always be looking for the next challenge or opportunity, regardless of who or where it comes from.

Strengths (at least according to Clifton)

  • Individualization: I'm intrigued by people and am skilled at figuring out how they can work together.
  • Arranger: I like to figure out how all variables and resources can be arranged for maximum productivity.
  • Responsibility: I take psychological ownership of my commitments.
  • Strategic: I can quickly spot patterns in complexity and translate them into a plan for progress.
  • Learner: I love to learn, and I strive to continuously improve along the way.

Work

Most of my work is not available for public viewing at the moment. For a sneak peek into my work and process, you can watch a talk I gave at the No Code Conference in 2019 called "Making Automation Feel More Human".

Also—feel free to check out my resume here.

You can find me on twitter, mastodon, linkedin, or at micahfenner@gmail.com.