Erica Hellbeericahellbe@gmail.com

Founding product designer · New York

I turn product
ambiguity into
systems people get

From social experiences used on college campuses to AI tools that help teams decide what to build next, I design the system, not just the screen.

LinkedIn

DoorList · Product Design

Turning an event utility into a more social experience.

Friends Activity made the social behavior already happening on DoorList visible, giving students another reason to return between events while showing the value of building a network.

My role
Product definition, interaction design, visual design and experimentation
Core question
Could visible social activity make DoorList more valuable between events?
View DoorList case study
DoorList Friends Activity feed and suggested social connections
Exploring activity types, discovery, onboarding and the empty-network experience.

The pivotal decision

Gate the feed, or let the feed prove its own value?

A minimum-friend gate sounded like a clean growth mechanic. It also created a chicken-and-egg problem: users with the weakest networks had to invest before they could see why a network mattered.

“Show people the value of the network before asking them to build it.”
DoorList comparison of ungated Friends Activity and a three-friend gated experience
We compared an open Friends Activity experience with gated variants and different messages.

What changed

The gate did not create a strong enough network-growth signal to justify its friction.

The more meaningful result appeared in retention: feature retention increased by 4.02%, and overall app retention increased by 1.60%. Making social activity visible helped DoorList feel relevant between events.

Pilot · Founding designer · B2B AI

Making noisy product signals feel actionable.

Pilot watches analytics, customer sentiment, shipped code and competitors to surface product opportunities. The design challenge is not displaying more information. It is helping a team understand what deserves attention and why.

My role
Founding product design across product strategy, UX, UI and design systems
Design problem
Build trust in an AI product by keeping its evidence legible and decisions reversible
View Pilot case study
Pilot suggestion detail showing an event-sharing problem, annotated interface and ticket creation controls
A suggestion keeps the product problem, interface context and next action together.
Pilot Product Tracker showing shipped changes, search coverage trends and metrics by product area
Product Tracker connects shipped changes to KPI movement across the product.

Designing for trust

01

Compress, don’t conceal

Lead with the takeaway while preserving the evidence behind it.

02

Make hierarchy do the explaining

Separate urgent signals, recurring themes and ambient context.

03

Keep people in control

AI proposes; product teams decide what deserves action.

About

A designer who likes being early.

I’m a product designer drawn to the stage where the product, the team and even the problem are still taking shape. I work closely with founders and engineers to frame the right question, test the risky assumption and build the system that lets a product grow.

I earned an athletic scholarship to study Interaction and UX/UI Design at Academy of Art University, where I competed in both tennis and soccer. My design work placed third in the university’s Spring Show exhibition. Originally from Stockholm, Sweden, I am now based in New York, where I bring the same discipline and range to work that unites product strategy with thoughtful craft.

Product strategyUX & UIDesign systemsExperimentation0→1 products

The work I care about lives between behavior and business: finding the product decision that makes an experience more valuable, then making it feel inevitable.

Have an ambitious product?

Let’s connect.

ericahellbe@gmail.com