Hey there — I'm Jared. I design mobile & web apps and enjoy music, gaming, and landscape gardening. →
Featured Work
TaxAct Xpert Help
I worked with the TaxAct Assisted Help team to design the next iteration of their efforts to promote a new expert help service. Xpert Help connects the customer with a knowledgeable tax expert to help answer questions that can’t be answered by Google or TaxAct’s own general-audience documentation. An initial design had been launched to a small set of customer during the previous tax season, and the business was ready to take it to the next level as they planned to roll it out to all customers in the next tax season.
Latest Writing
This Is How I Fight
Ideas don’t need to be new to be powerful. That’s the great thing about art: anyone can express an idea in their own way and give it new life.
Watching Everything Everywhere All At Once was pretty overwhelming. If you’re not familiar, the film follows haggard laundromat operator Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) as she bounces across parallel universes, guided by her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) from “the alphaverse” to stop their daughter Joy/Jobu Tupaki (Stephanie Hsu)—also from the alphaverse—from destroying everything by jumping into a giant, nihilistic everything bagel. I know, it’s a lot.
The film is a bonkers, surreal romp designed to navigate complex subjects and pull the viewer into Evelyn’s drinking-from-the-firehose experience of discovery & eventual awakening. There is plenty of subject matter to digest as the film barrels ahead: the importance of even the smallest choices, the struggle for true intimacy, the search for approval, choosing hope over despair, and the self-discovery and unconditional acceptance of others in Evelyn’s redemptive arc, just to name a few. And, yes, that’s all important. It’s especially good that Evelyn learns from her experiences and chooses to atone. That’s the hopeful takeaway for all of us: it’s never too late to wake up and evolve.
Then there’s Waymond.
