She completed the Master's in Human-Computer Interaction and Design from the University of Washington and currently leads research and design for invoicing at Xero. Xero is a New Zealand-born platform helping millions of small businesses worldwide get paid, manage cash flow, and stay on top of their finances. Her experience includes complex, high-stakes products used daily by millions of small businesses globally.
Eliza's work has focused on complex legacy software, using mixed methods research and quantitative data to understand how people actually work, and applying systems thinking and interaction design to ship products that are genuinely usable under real conditions.
Earlier in her career she worked as a Senior Product Designer at Sotheby's for two years, bringing design rigour to one of the world's most storied auction houses.
She also worked as a development associate at Housing Plus Solutions, a nonprofit serving chronically homeless women in New York.
She came to design from fine art, with residencies at Skowhegan, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and De Ateliers in Amsterdam — a background that shapes how she thinks about craft, attention, and what it means for something to be well made.
When not working, she hunts mushrooms and explores New York restaurants.
De Ateliers
Amsterdam, NL, 2007–2009
MFA, Visual Arts
Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University
BFA, Cinema Studies (with honors) Tisch School of the Arts, NYU
5+ years designing across Xero's payments and invoicing products, working on regulated financial workflows, legacy modernisation, and large-scale product migrations.
Invoicing (2023–present)
Led design for Xero's largest forced product migration: Classic Invoicing (18 years old) to New Invoicing, global user base, no opt-out. CSAT rose from 56% to 82% post-migration. Ran 30+ in-depth interviews with power users (accountants, bookkeepers, high-volume invoicers); the segment most likely to resist the migration. Built an in-product feedback mechanism with PMM using a Qualtrics-linked button, no code change required; collected hundreds of qualitative responses that would otherwise have been unreachable. Ran a switch-back survey targeting users who reverted to Classic, and a separate performance survey to distinguish UX friction from genuine system slowness. Led 4 large quantitative surveys; analysed 93,000+ categorised feedback responses. Built a Qualtrics feedback dashboard and a Looker Studio CSAT dashboard, replacing migration-era snapshot tracking with continuous measurement. Designed for localization across AU, NZ, UK, US, and global markets; conducted accessibility testing with Fable (WCAG 2.1 AA). Currently working on extended address, the most requested feature, designing for address format variation across international markets. Used AI tools (V0.dev, Claude) for rapid functional prototyping alongside Figma prototypes.
Payments (2021–2023)
Contributed to Future of Xero (FOX), a company-wide initiative to modernise legacy software through like-for-like updates, establishing design patterns that could scale across older product surfaces. Led design for the GoCardless GC4X to GCiX migration: moving merchants from a legacy Direct Debit integration to Xero's native platform. Designed mandate sending, mandate matching (resolving 68% unmatched mandates), and the optional migration flow. Designed Instant Bank Pay, Xero's first one-off bank transfer product for the UK market. Full design process including usability testing and beta recruitment; launched to 10% of UK users, scaled to 50%. Led analysis of 34,600+ payment service disconnection events to understand why merchants were leaving; findings shaped roadmap prioritisation. Built CSAT measurement framework for the payments design team. Assisted on Deposits feature design.
Sotheby's — Senior UX Designer | November 2018–December 2020
Led UX design for internal auction management tool, and registration and payments teams across global markets. Designed multilingual experiences for international audiences across multiple languages and regions. Redesigned transactional registration for the public website; created wireframes, flow diagrams, and content recommendations advocating for a user-centered experience. Handled complex IA design for high-stakes transactional flows. Presented research findings to stakeholders, product owners, developers, and UI designers in an agile environment.
Product & Interaction Design: end-to-end product design, information architecture, wireframing & prototyping, interaction design, design systems, responsive/mobile-first design
Content Design: UX writing, plain-language content design, localization & internationalization
Craft & Quality: accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA), visual design, design QA
Collaboration: cross-functional delivery (PM, eng, policy/legal), stakeholder presentation, mentorship
Tools: Figma, Validately, Segment, Qualtrics, Looker Studio, Jira, Asana, Claude, Glean, Askable, Usertesting.com, Miro, Figjam, Pendo, HotJar, Fable, V0.dev.
Last Updated 24.10.31