About
Before UX Had a Name
Before UX had a name, I was designing magazines, packaging, and annual reports at a design agency in Quebec City. That’s where I learned what design actually is — not just a deliverable, but a communication tool. A way to make something clearer, to fix a problem, to help people understand something they couldn’t see before.
I carried that discipline into software when the web arrived, and never looked back.
In 1999 I joined Taleo, an enterprise talent management platform that would eventually be acquired by Oracle. I spent nine and a half years there — long enough to watch it transform from a Quebec City startup called Recruitsoft into Taleo Corporation, a publicly traded company that Oracle would eventually acquire for $1.9 billion. In that time I conceived and designed the Recruiter Webtop™ from scratch — a dashboard that became the company’s trademarked flagship interface, used by HP, American Airlines, Deloitte, Bombardier, and hundreds of Fortune 500 companies across more than 190 countries. What I remember most about it isn’t the outcome. It’s the moment I realized the problem wasn’t yet visible to anyone else on the team — and that I could see it clearly. That’s when I understood what I was actually good at.
After Taleo, I moved fast. Liquidnet in New York — institutional traders, billion-dollar workflows, systems so complex that nobody inside the company had a complete picture of how they worked. I had to map it before I could design it. Amazon in Seattle — selected from over 2,000 candidates, embedded with a small team that felt like a startup inside a giant. A Firefox plugin I designed reached 250,000 downloads. I left to come home to my family, and I’ve never regretted it.
Desjardins brought me back to something essential — designing for trust. The AccèsD mobile banking app served millions of Canadians. Security wasn’t a constraint. It was the product. The redesign rated 4.5 out of 5 on Google Play, and shipped on iPhone and Android.
Eight years at TELUS Health taught me what high stakes really means. I was designing for clinicians managing patients remotely — people whose decisions about prescriptions and allergies had life-safety consequences. Working in healthcare made me approach every design decision with a level of rigour I hadn’t needed before.
Somewhere along the way, a psychologist assessed my problem-solving approach and put something into words I’d always sensed: I don’t just find solutions, I find innovative, out-of-the-box solutions. Getting selected from over 2,000 candidates at Amazon had told me something similar. The Recruiter Webtop™ had told me too.
At Brizo FoodMetrics I led a design team that grew from 3 to 11, tripled weekly active sessions within four months of launch, and adapted the MUI design system for their platform. The platform was acquired by Datassential. I moved on.
Now I’m building Peek-Now — a product I started because I was tired of standing by my window in Quebec City, looking at a 10°C forecast and having no idea what to wear. Ten degrees in spring feels nothing like ten degrees in fall. I figured if I had that problem, other people did too. So I built it. It proved itself on the web first — real authentication, Stripe payments, a Supabase database, a GitHub repository, hosted on Vercel — then went native on iOS. I designed it and coded it.
Thirty years in, the work still surprises me. The problems are always harder than they look. The solutions are always simpler than expected. And the space between those two things — that’s where I live.