Maya Chen
Booking Jan 2027

RoleProduct designer, independent

Based inGreenpoint, Brooklyn

Local time10:42 am in New York

StatusBooking from January 2027

Maya Chen, product designer

I design the screens people trust with their money, their health and their Saturday mornings. Ten years across fintech, healthcare and booking; independent since 2024, for teams that need one senior designer to own the hardest screen in the product.

  1. 01TallyBanking app
  2. 02CadenceClinical dashboard
  3. 03BallastDesign system
  4. 04CourtsideBooking flow

§ 01Selected work, 2019–2026

Screens that had to be right.

Four products, each shown through the screen that mattered most. Point at a screen to watch it work, or press Replay.

01 / 04TallyBanking app · iOS and Android2019–2021Design lead

A checking account that sets your taxes aside before you can spend them.

Tally is a bank account for 410,000 freelancers, most of whom used to meet their tax bill in April like a stranger. I led the redesign of the home screen and built Tax Pots: every payment that comes in is split before it lands, at a rate worked out from last year’s return.

To open an account, down from 11
4min
Members who check Tax Pots weekly
38%
App Store rating, 31,000 reviews
4.8
Tally / Home + Set aside · 390 × 844
02 / 04Cadence HealthRemote patient monitoring2021–2024Lead product designer

A monitoring dashboard a night nurse can read in four seconds.

Cadence watches 18,000 patients at home through blood-pressure cuffs, scales and oximeters. The old home screen showed everything, so nurses trusted none of it. We cut it to one question, who needs me now, and rebuilt alerts around thresholds each care team sets for its own patients.

Fewer false-alarm alerts
−41%
Median time to respond, from 6m 10s
2m 50s
Clinics running the new dashboard
120
Cadence / Overview · Desktop · 1440 × 936
03 / 04Fieldwork · BallastDesign system for freight software2024–2025Systems lead, contract

One design system for three freight products and the 46 engineers who build them.

Fieldwork had three apps, four blues and 31 different buttons. I audited every screen, wrote the tokens as a contract between design and code, and shipped Ballast: one library with the same names in Figma and in the codebase, so a designer’s safety/500 is an engineer’s safety/500.

Components in one library
212
Less time spent on handoff
−60%
Primary buttons, down from 31
1
Ballast / Foundations · Figma · v2.4
04 / 04CourtsideCourt booking, web and app2025–2026Product designer, contract

Book a court in three taps, from the front desk or the G train.

Courtside runs six tennis and pickleball clubs across Brooklyn and Queens. Booking used to mean a phone call and a lot of patience. I designed the flow members now use 9,000 times a week: pick a day, pick a time, pay. Taken slots stay on screen, so nobody wonders if the app is broken.

Booking conversion, up from 31%
58%
Median time to book a court
24sec
Fewer calls to the front desk
−70%
Courtside / Book a court · Web · 1440 × 916

§ 02Approach

How the work gets made.

No mood boards, no 80-slide decks. A sentence, a prototype, a system, and a month of listening after launch.

Fewer screens, better decisions, and Figma files engineers actually want to open.

  1. 01

    Write the sentence first

    Before any pixels, I write the one sentence the screen has to say. If the team can’t agree on it, no layout will save us, and it’s far cheaper to find that out on a Tuesday than in QA.

    Week 1
  2. 02

    Prototype with real data

    By week two there’s a clickable prototype full of real numbers, real names and the ugly edge cases: the $0.03 balance, the patient with two cuffs, the court booked by someone called Bartholomew.

    Week 2
  3. 03

    Systems over screens

    Every one-off either becomes a component with a name or gets deleted. Handoff is a library with tokens and states, not a pile of frames called “final final v3”.

    Weeks 3–10
  4. 04

    Stay after launch

    For the first month after we ship I sit in on support calls and read the session logs. That’s where version 1.1 comes from, and it’s usually better than version 1.

    Weeks 11–12

A typical twelve-week engagement

One column, one week

  1. Audit and interviewsW01–02
  2. Frame the problemW02–03
  3. Prototype and testW03–07
  4. Design and system workW05–10
  5. Build alongside engineeringW07–11
  6. Launch and measureW11–12

Weekly demo every Thursday

Shared Figma and Slack from day one

From $14,500 a month

§ 03Experience

Ten years, four teams.

From a Brooklyn agency to fintech, healthcare and my own studio in Greenpoint. Full CV and references on request.

  1. 2024 — NowCurrent

    Independent product designer

    Maya Chen Studio · Greenpoint, Brooklyn

    Contract lead for health and fintech teams. Built Ballast for Fieldwork, redesigned booking for Courtside, and I’m back at Cadence through December for version three.

    • Cadence Health
    • Courtside
    • Fieldwork

  2. 2021 — 2024

    Lead product designer, clinician tools

    Cadence Health · New York

    Took remote monitoring from 40 clinics to 120. Rebuilt alerts around care-team thresholds, ran 60 hours of ride-alongs with night nurses, and grew the design team from one to five.

    • Dashboards
    • Alerting
    • Team of 4

  3. 2018 — 2021

    Senior product designer, then design lead

    Tally · Remote

    Redesigned the home screen, shipped Tax Pots and invoicing, and helped grow membership from 60,000 to 410,000. Wrote the first version of Tally’s design principles on a train to Philadelphia.

    • iOS
    • Android
    • Fintech

  4. 2016 — 2018

    Product designer

    Northgate Studio · Dumbo, Brooklyn

    Booking and scheduling products for 14 clients, from a climbing gym to a dental group of 30 offices. Learned to love a calendar component.

    • Agency
    • Booking

  5. 2012 — 2016

    BFA, Communications Design

    Pratt Institute · Brooklyn

    Thesis: a wayfinding system for the G train, printed, laminated and taped up at Nassau Avenue for one very good week.

§ 04Kind words

Maya is who you give the screen that can’t be wrong. Then she makes it look obvious.

Pilar Ramos VP Product, Cadence Health

Her Figma files read like documentation. Our engineers argued over who got to build her tickets.

Magnus Berg Staff engineer, Fieldwork

Online bookings doubled the month we shipped. The front desk sent her a fruit basket and a thank-you card.

Joss Albano COO, Courtside

§ 05Writing and talks

Notes from the work.

I write when a project teaches me something I’d have paid to know earlier.

  1. 2026Your empty states are lying to youEssaymayachen.design9 min
  2. 2026Designing for the 3 a.m. nurseTalkInterface Week, New York24 min
  3. 2025Tokens are a contract, not a paletteEssayBallast docs12 min
  4. 2025The four-second dashboardTalkHealth UX Summit, Boston31 min
  5. 2024What I learned shipping moneyPodcastSmall Screens, episode 11248 min

§ 06Contact

Send me the hard screen.

Email

[email protected]

Phone
(555) 016-3381
Studio
155 Calyer Street, Studio 4R
Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY 11222
Hours
Mon–Thu, 9:30 am to 6 pm ET. Fridays are for writing.

Availability

  1. Q4 26Booked · Cadence v3
  2. Q1 27One slot open
  3. Q2 27Open
  4. Q3 27Open
What do you need?