User research
Product design
A smarter, data-driven approach to wildfire analysis.
My role
Wildfires are becoming more severe. Insurance policies are being cancelled.
Most wildfire mitigation advice is vague or overwhelming. Property owners are being dropped from their insurance plans and don’t know where to start, or how to measure whether they’re improving their risk. Meanwhile, insurance and fire agencies lack scalable tools to communicate mitigation needs.
Helping people act on wildfire risk, not just observe it.
Perch is building a wildfire risk analysis platform: a SaaS product that helps insurers, homeowners, and fire departments assess property-specific risk using a layered scoring system.
Our platform breaks risk into three major categories, each with sub-factors and supporting data points:
Predict
Use structure-level data to predict fire risk before it spreads
Prevent
Get tailored recommendations homeowners can act on now
Protect
Support safer communities with shared data and clear priorities
The process
Pivoting from sensors to software
Perch began as a hardware startup developing sensors to monitor wildfire risk in hard-to-reach places. By the time I rejoined the team, they had realized that market was saturated and decided to pursue a risk score solution.
I led the end-to-end design process during this pivotal product shift. Throughout this process, I:
Reviewed interview recordings
Synthesized themes
Shared insights with the team
Helped shape the product strategy.
Designing without a finished product
While our data science team worked to develop the algorithm that would drive the platform, I was designing the interface that would present its results. That meant building layouts, hierarchies, and interaction patterns without knowing exactly what the final data would look like.
To manage this uncertainty, I focused on:
Flexibility in structure: designing layouts that could scale with evolving outputs
Tight collaboration with the algorithm team: checking in frequently to align on direction and assumptions
Rooting every design decision in user needs: ensuring clarity and actionability for both technical and non-technical users
Lessons from designing in motion
Take ownership early
In a fast-moving startup, no one’s handing you a roadmap—you have to make one.
Use what you have
Even without finalized data, I found ways to prototype, test, and move forward.
Stay flexible
Working alongside an evolving algorithm meant every layout needed to continuously adapt.
What’s ahead for Perch
We’re now gearing up to test the prototype with fire professionals and insurance reps to validate comprehension and utility. Their feedback will help shape our next iteration and inform the high-fidelity designs we’ll use for pitching and piloting.