The IDEO team quickly discovered that the challenge of designing a Digital@FEMSA super app for tens of millions of customers was matched only by the operational complexity of bringing together different teams that had already created various apps with separate value propositions. Not to mention the 22,000 stores specifically tailored to local communities.

To kick off the project, the IDEO team built on FEMSA’s already deep understanding of its customers by meeting them in their homes and communities. The team discovered that users didn't care about long-term rewards; instead, they wanted everyday help to thrive long-term. Connecting omnichannel rewards to regular spending would allow them to save time and money—something they said was particularly important. Along with market research, insights like these directly informed the app's design, ensuring that it was compatible with users' everyday habits and preferences.

Meanwhile, the project team also worked to ensure the app fit the priorities of the various teams inside Digital@FEMSA, designing a comprehensive process for testing joint value propositions. Together, the team created a new design system, iconography, and set of unifying principles. IDEO also worked closely with the Digital@FEMSA teams to ensure that the app's design was in line with their strategic goals and technical capabilities, and built the app's initial information architecture. They incorporated secure transactions, effortless coupon redemption, personalized offers, and a cohesive loyalty program.

From there, the IDEO and Digital@FEMSA teams quickly transitioned into the design and development phase, producing prototypes of the new app, dubbed Spin Premia. With the help of user testing, they were able to continuously iterate to improve the app's features and functionalities, creating a user experience that was both seamless and intuitive. In just 10 months, they went from a small digital team with an ambitious idea, to a 150+ people product organization and an MVP launched in one region. And thanks to a tight partnership, the teams were able to seamlessly integrate Spin Premia into Digital@FEMSA's existing systems, resulting in a scalable implementation nationwide just a few months later.

The introduction of Spin Premia was a milestone in FEMSA's digital transformation path. Following a true ship and iterate model, just a few months into the project, the company released a smaller, focused version of the app in just one city in Mexico to quickly learn from customer experience before expanding to new regions. Since then, the Spin Premia app has quickly gained popularity, offering a safe and user-friendly platform that millions of Mexican consumers have embraced. It has also allowed FEMSA to broaden its digital portfolio and extend its customer base throughout Mexico, elevating customer satisfaction and fueling business expansion.

13 million Mexicans visit FEMSA’s OXXO convenience stores every day. But the company had ambitions to leverage digital experiences to increase customer engagement.

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To get there, Digital@FEMSA needed to deliver exceptional digital products with the agility to serve an entire population.

4.7 stars

Spin Premia’s app store rating

22.8 million

active Spin Premia program users

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Midscale hotel brands are the fastest-growing hotel segment in the US, attractive to both travelers and hotel owners. But often, their messaging feels repetitive, and travelers have a tough time differentiating between them. With a warm, thoughtfully designed midscale brand, IHG had an enormous opportunity to distinguish itself in a crowded market. 

IHG’s goal was to deliver a guest experience that felt genuinely unique and resonant—and quickly. With costs on the rise, many owners were motivated to turn toward conversion brands, which allow them to refurbish hotels under a new brand rather than invest in construction, a way to grow their portfolio in a tight financing market. Meanwhile, IHG’s competitors were set to introduce new conversion brands of their own. The company was looking for a partner that could work swiftly and iteratively to deliver a distinct brand.

For the IDEO team, the answer lay in communicating the brand’s value, starting with a custom logo rendered by hand. Inspired by vintage sign painting and modernist typography, the team sketched different versions of the letterforms, reviewing them with IHG until they had a set that brought to life the generosity and sense of invitation associated with the hotel’s spaces. They also worked to ensure the wordmark was visually balanced and would translate well across a variety range of scales. From there, they built an expansive brand world, including bespoke navigation icons, a full interior and exterior signage system, and a video to support the Garner launch.

The result is a hotel brand that stands apart in its category for both travelers and owners: thoughtful and well-designed yet affordable. As competition in the midscale segment continues to increase, Garner has been central to IHG’s growth strategy. Launched in the fall of 2023, Garner opened 100 hotels worldwide in just 16 months, making it the fastest-ever IHG brand to scale globally. The brand’s increasing popularity among owners and developers is driven by the growing demand for conversion properties, which accounted for 52% of IHG’s room openings in 2025. Garner plans to continue its rapid expansion with nearly 80 additional hotels in 12 key markets, including the US, Mexico, Italy, and Japan.

Conversions account for 12% of the global hotel pipeline, enabling hotels to switch brands and refurbish, boosting revenue without expensive construction.
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The US midscale hotel segment, valued at $14B, is expected to reach $18B by 2030.

100 new Garner Hotels

in less than 3 years—the fastest-scaling brand in IHG's history

500 Garner Hotels

planned in the next 10 years; 1,000 over the next 20

Alzheimer’s and dementia are notoriously difficult to treat—and scientists estimate that some 50 percent of people who have dementia are undiagnosed. Recognition of symptoms and early intervention are key. Together and IDEO set out to conduct user research to inspire new products that would help patients with cognitive decline take charge of their brain health.

The first priority was to expand the reach of the Moving Together program, which combines group movement exercises with mindfulness techniques, led by a trained group instructor. The IDEO team conducted remote and in-person interviews in Florida, where one in five residents is age 65 and older, and rates of Alzheimer’s and dementia are among the highest in the country. One of the key insights the team discovered was that many older adults didn’t understand how behaviors like smoking, exercise, and diet can be risk factors for cognitive decline. Their input inspired a new design principle for the program: “No naked feedback.” Any time participants received health coaching advice about modifying their lifestyle, they would also be given resources on why and how to do it, so they would have a pathway to boosting their brain health. 

The IDEO team folded insights like this one into the design for four new product offerings, including personalized brain health education, new online community engagement tools, partnership programs, and health coaching services, as well as a new user interface to illustrate them. Along with Together they also developed an implementation roadmap of next steps to bring the new digital product offerings to market, such as hiring a brain health coach and creating a new course curriculum. Now, Together has enrolled 165 people in the Boost Your Brain Health Clinical Trial, which is looking at outcomes such as reduced risk of Alzheimer's and maintenance of cognitive function for the Brain Health Together program. With trial completion in Q3 2024 and product launch in early 2025, growing numbers of people with MCI will have access to this exciting program. Together incorporated almost all of the elements from the IDEO roadmap into the final curriculum, and the team often refers back to insights the team gathered as guiding design principles.

Fighting barriers to diagnosis

With its online program growing, Together wanted to take on an even bigger problem: dementia underdiagnosis. Co-founder Dr. Deborah Barnes had recently developed an algorithm that uses patients’ health records to calculate their risk of undiagnosed dementia, called the electronic health record Risk of Alzheimer's and Dementia Assessment Rule (eRADAR). Together was looking to find creative ways to equip and empower providers to use risk scores like eRADAR in primary care settings.

One piece of the puzzle? Many primary care doctors are unaware that better management of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia can have a positive impact on other chronic health issues—like diabetes, hypertension, and depression. So by encouraging providers to prioritize dementia care, they can help support the overall health of older adults with cognitive decline. The IDEO team recommended a curriculum for continuing education courses for doctors that make that link clear—another step toward increasing dementia diagnosis and improving overall health.

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Better help, sooner

To understand the patient experience, Together and IDEO decided to work directly with patients and caregivers to uncover what was stopping them from asking for dementia screening. The IDEO team quickly learned many patients were afraid of facing a diagnosis that signified a loss of agency and control, especially when they didn’t believe there were good treatment options. Often, they were unaware that there were things they could do to improve their brain health. They needed to know what steps to take after a diagnosis, and who could provide actionable advice. In response, the IDEO team designed a digital activity toolkit and physical booklet to guide patient families through the early stages of a dementia diagnosis, including recognizing the signs and symptoms, having better conversations with their doctor, and getting connected to support groups and programs like Moving Together.

Solving the problem of dementia underdiagnosis involves complex systems-level thinking and designing for the entire health ecosystem of patients, providers, and insurance payers, and solutions for Alzheimer’s and dementia care are still in their infancy. But already, this work is empowering patients and doctors to prioritize brain health and get screened sooner, and Together, which has since been acquired by Linus Health, is still working to move dementia care forward.

Approximately 12-18% of people aged 60 or older live with mild cognitive impairment, while memory loss, Alzheimer's and dementia affect more than 50 million people around the world.

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An estimated 50% of people living with dementia are undiagnosed.

165 enrolled

in the Boost Your Brain Health Clinical Trial

Many companies view culture-building initiatives as nice-to-haves. At Moderna, Mindsets are a business imperative, crucial to its plans to develop breakthrough products quickly.

For companies working on solutions as vital as a COVID-19 vaccine, delays and mistakes don’t just mean missing a product launch date—they’re life-or-death, and on a large scale. Moderna had to ensure that its employees knew how to make the right decisions, evaluate risk, and move quickly—even if they came from organizations with more bureaucracy and less risk tolerance. In 2021, IDEO sat down with longtime Moderna veterans to hear stories about moments that exemplify the company's culture, like the day a critical piece of equipment arrived but was too big to fit through the door. Taking it apart would have added days to their timeline. So employees took sledgehammers to a wall instead. Stories like this one fed into the crafting of the list of Mindsets, such as “Act with urgency: Action today compounds the lives saved tomorrow” and “We behave like owners: The solutions we’re building go beyond any job description.”

To gather feedback, the team shared the draft Mindsets with a diverse set of employees—new hires, veterans, folks already closely aligned with the culture, folks for whom it wasn’t the most natural fit, and a plethora of employee resource groups. CEO Stéphane Bancel and the leadership team took crafting and iterating on the Mindsets very seriously, wordsmithing and tweaking them with the team until they were ready to share them officially. Now, new hires learn about the company’s Mindsets in Moderna ONE, an onboarding process that IDEO helped revamp, while existing employees attend a workshop to ensure everyone at the company knows not only what to do but also how to do it effectively. In a matter of weeks, IDEO helped Moderna codify its culture for employees and set the company up for continued success. Moderna continues to embed these Mindsets across the entire employee lifecycle to systematically scale its culture.

For employees new and old, the clarity of the Mindsets has made it easier to understand expectations and to understand the company itself. Long-term veterans responded with comments like, "These really help explain why we're working this way,” while one newbie said, "It feels like a homecoming to hear the culture that we’re trying to bring through.” But more than just solving a cultural issue, the new Mindsets have fulfilled a business imperative: Holding on to the secret sauce that made Moderna successful to begin with, setting the stage for its next five years of breakthroughs.

When the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 health crisis a pandemic in March of 2020, Moderna had fewer than 1,000 employees. Four years later, it’s more than five times the size.

Ranked #1

BioSpace Best Place to Work, large company in 2024

Ranked #6

Boston Consulting Group’s 50 Most Innovative Report in 2023

Ranked #4

Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 List in 2023

I first began creating cartoons as a way of communicating with Marta, my wife, when we started dating. I hate texts, so instead, I would draw a cartoon, take a picture, and send it to her. We are both New Yorker readers, and at some point she said that mine were better than most of the the magazine’s. She is not biased. Neither is my mom, also a fan of mine, so I thought it was worth the shot.

I submitted for the first time in the summer of 2016. A former coworker is married to David Sipress, a classic New Yorker cartoonist, and one of my favorites. David kindly offered to take a look at my cartoons. He said that they were totally publishable, and encouraged me to submit to the magazine. He also shared a few pro tips, like that The New Yorker very rarely publishes puns, and when it does, it’s almost always ironically (almost a quarter of the cartoons I sent him were puns).

Almost every week, the New Yorker cartoon editor meets with artists and reviews their work. This meeting is open to anybody. You just show up, sign up, and present your cartoons. So, one hot day in June, I printed my cartoons and showed up at the offices at One World Trade Center, ready to make an impression (good or bad).

The great thing about the cartoon meeting is that you sit with the editor and he gives you feedback, right there. Back then, Bob Mankoff was still the cartoon editor. The opportunity to have a private critique session with somebody like Bob was fantastic. On our first meeting he said that he liked my cartoons, that the drawings were very good, and the jokes were “not bad,” which is quite a compliment coming from him. He picked four of my cartoons and I was thrilled. I thought that I had it made and I was going to start selling cartoons right away.

Not quite. It turns out, the meeting is just the first filter. The editor has a subsequent meeting with David Remnick, The New Yorker’s editor, where he shows him his selection of cartoons for the week. David decides which to keep, but before the magazine buys anything, they will peruse their archives—and cartoons from other major publications—and check that they have not published anything similar first. It’s quite the process. They didn’t buy a cartoon that time. Nor the following week. Nor the next one.

In my meetings with Bob, he was quite blunt, but always funny, and he often built on my cartoons, coming up with new iterations or different ideas for the same joke. The main criticism I received was that my captions were not sharp or punchy enough. That makes sense because English is my second language. In Spanish, I am hilarious.

After many rejections, you might think I’d have gotten discouraged and stopped trying, but I have fun making cartoons. Rejection is just a part of the process that every cartoonist has to endure. It took David Sipress 25 years of submissions until The New Yorker published his work. Bob Mankoff himself sent more than 2,000 cartoons before he sold his first one. However, there are geniuses like Ed Steed who sell after their first submission. He is my favorite. I hate him with every fiber of my soul.

I’m also a bit of a masochist, perhaps as a side effect from attending a Catholic school for 13 years. I am an atheist now, but I still think that the only way to reach salvation is through suffering. I come up with projects that require a high level of commitment, take a painstaking amount of work, and provide low returns. I am very smart.

You can say that there is some sense of pride in a perfect record of 100% cartoon failure—otherwise I wouldn’t put them up with a big red REJECTED stamp on them. But the thing that I am most proud of is that Bob Mankoff said of one of my cartoons that it was the worst he had seen in his entire life. Hell, that’s something to brag about. I said, “Don’t worry, I can do worse,” and he burst out laughing.

However, I am not going to lie. Sometimes it hurts, especially after a few rounds of rejections. But that’s just my ego itching. Who wants to be published in The New Yorker after all? What a bunch of snobs.

That being said, I plan to go back to The New Yorker very soon to meet the new cartoon editor. I might get luckier with her. Getting into the rhythm of drawing ten cartoons every couple of weeks helped me hone my drawing skills, and I’ve missed it since I stopped. The style of the drawings I make for our projects, which often end up in front of clients, is the direct result of those dozens of hours of making cartoons. It’s like illustration gym.

And it’s interesting, the more cartoons you create, the more ideas you generate. At first I was afraid of running dry, but I was surprised when the opposite happened. I have a little red book where I write down ideas for cartoons, and the list keeps growing.

But, most importantly, I just enjoy making cartoons. Sometimes you can see me sitting by myself in a cafe, laughing out loud at my own drawings, which is quite a pitiful scene if you think about it. We are all going to end up as human compost, so we might as well laugh a little on the way to our graves.

Thanks to Lawrence Abrahamson, Michael Hendrix, and Lindsey Rodabaugh for encouragement and help with the exhibit.

IDEO communication designer Juan Astasio knows a thing or two about rejection. His great ambition is to publish a cartoon in The New Yorker. In the last three years, he’s submitted more than 100 cartoons and met with an editor to discuss his work ten times. Still, nada. But instead of being discouraged, Juan has embraced his failure, sharing his jokes with the New York studio on the walls of one of its phone booths. Here’s what he’s picked up in the process, why it’s worth it for him to keep going, and what, exactly, he’s learned from failure.

In one sentence, who are you?

I am Paul, and I run S.E.H Kelly, which is a menswear company based in London.

What do you do? How did you learn it?

We make clothes for men, every aspect of which—the cloth, the buttons, the buckles—is made by suppliers from around the British Isles. There are two of us at the company, and the other one, Sara, learned the trade in a tailoring house on London's Savile Row. I have a background in retail and design and other things, and together we cover most bases.

3 favorite possessions?

I don't really cherish possessions. I like my watch, which was a Christmas present, and—well, my bag is very much appreciated, being as it carries half my life without much complaint. My third favourite possession eludes me, sorry.

What does a typical work session look like?

Wake up, reply to emails, get train to workshop, pick up things, get train to a factory, drop off things, reply to emails, run around chasing up problems with cloth or patterns or making, eat, reply to emails, wrap and pack orders, print order documentation, walk to post office to send orders, walk back to factory, tie up loose ends, tidy up, get train home, eat, update or fix website, reply to emails, bed. Oh—and fit in some design if chance permits.

The workshop is our headquarters, and is first in a row of very small workers' units built at the end of the 1800s. It has a downstairs where we hang a selection of our garments and store various components such as buckles and horn buttons; and an upstairs, where we use a makeshift office and undertake the various more moribund duties of running a business.

It is a good little space—although rather dark—and is difficult to locate even when you're standing nearby. Visitors often remark, "Not easy to find, are you?" which I take as a compliment, since I've always enjoyed visiting places which are off the beaten track, or require some effort to discover. Always more fun, I think, and exciting, and hopefully brings a tinge more interest and character than a typical shopfront.

How do you get over creative block?

I don't force anything. If I struggle for a solution—be it a design solution or some written words—I leave it alone and do something else. I find the best ideas are those that at least appear to come naturally, even if they're the result of days or weeks of subconscious thinking.

What was the last item on your to do list?

"Remove collar from shirt for man in Norway."

How do you see the world in 2078?

Much more convergence of culture facilitated with cheaper travel, cheaper and more widely available communication technology, and hopefully much more mutual appreciation of one another rather than squabbling.

What’s your number one bucket list item?

Be absolutely, fully, and entirely satisfied, without caveat or "to-do," with every piece of our collection.

Who are you creative crushin’ on lately?

The game developer Ojiro Fumoto.

Shopping online often feels like work. To find one shirt, you have to slog through dozens of pages of boring photos of boring people wearing boring clothes. This isn't true of S.E.H Kelly. A visit online feels like a tour through their hidden, rain-damp workshop—from photos of button jars and bolts of cloth to the quirky ways that they describe their proper attire. I absolutely adore it. For this installment of Creative Crushes, S.E.H Kelly founder Paul Vincent shared some details about his label and design process.

I’m not alone in turning to mindfulness during the design process. Here’s how my colleagues and I use mindfulness to move from overwhelmed to optimistic, even during the toughest projects.

1. Adopt a beginner's mindset

When you're approaching a new design challenge, it’s easy to bring your biases and baggage to the table. But this is the moment to stay open: The root of creativity is embracing the millions of possibilities at your fingertips.

The “beginner's mindset” is a Buddhist principle we practice at IDEO. It means starting fresh, assuming nothing, and living the question. We see a lack of deep expertise in a new topic as an opportunity to get creative. Anyone can adopt a beginner’s mindset—all that’s required is openness and receptivity.

2. Practice radical acceptance

When I first learned about acceptance, it seemed to me it was just another word for complacency. As if to say, “That’s the way things are! Why bother trying to change them?” But on closer reflection, I realized that accepting the world as it is today requires a willingness to sit with uncomfortable truths and to see problems from all angles before jumping in to solve them.

By accepting a situation, you’re able to design a better approach from a place of non-resistance. At IDEO, we have a bias toward action: We make lots of tangible designs as a way of imagining the future. But action can be so much more impactful when it’s grounded in reality and driven by clear intentions.

3. Drop your ego

Mindfulness teaches us that the ego—the part of us that demands to be “right”—is not our true self. Our true self is found in the in-between moments when we’re able to just be—the times when we take in what’s around us, quiet our minds, and open ourselves up to feedback from the people we’re designing for.

One way we try to drop our egos at IDEO is by creating “sacrificial concepts”— prototypes that we design but ultimately cast aside in service of learning. Critiquing a sacrificial concept is an invitation for people to share their reactions without hurting anyone else’s feelings.

I sometimes suffer from the “disease to please,” wanting people to like everything I’ve made. But as I’ve leaned into mindfulness, I’ve realized that my ego can slow me down, and I've learned how to set it aside.

4. Listen deeply

Have you ever noticed during a conversation that the person you’re talking to is mimicking your posture? If you put your hands on the table, so do they; if you sit up straight, they follow suit. In conversation, people are often looking for an opening to make their next point, rather than paying attention to what’s being said. But if you focus on your own replies, you miss out on the words, tone, and body language of the people around you.

In The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle says that when you practice judgement-free listening, you’re giving another person the power of your presence. At IDEO, every project starts with listening. Our human-centered, interdisciplinary design approach means that the whole team learns empathy skills and joins in the design research process. Listening elevates the voices of the people we’re designing for and ensures that their dreams and worries are our starting point.

5. Meditate in order to create

One of the biggest misconceptions about creativity is that creative people always wake up feeling compelled to create. The truth is that this compulsion is often blocked by insecurities or external pressures. In The Untethered Soul, Michael Singer describes these as “samskaras,” or energy blockages, which can be cleared by acknowledging them and focusing on your breathing. Tolle suggests that when you want to be creative, you should go back and forth between breathing and the task at hand every few minutes. Only when you’re clear-headed can you make.

At IDEO, we have a meditation group that meets every day, and any designer is welcome to be in the presence of others and connect inward. This ritual, and the support of the wider IDEO community, are wonderful reminders that everyone still has room to learn and improve.

By making mindfulness a regular part of my design practice, I’ve not only become a better designer, but hopefully a kinder, more patient, and more empathetic person. It’s been a journey well worth taking.

Illustrations by Cassandra Fountaine

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When I start to feel overwhelmed at work, with too much information to take in and too little time to process it all, I rely on mindfulness. Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the fathers of modern mindfulness, describes the practice as “paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.” It’s all about tuning into your sense of inner calm so you can be a better conduit for new insights and solutions.

A San Franciscan, Jimmy worried that California’s blue state status might make residents apathetic about voting, even though there were important state and local issues on the ballot that were hardly being covered. “Luckily, there was a proposition requiring porn stars to wear condoms,” he says. “I felt I could help make the local ballot a little more interesting.”

Jimmy created a site called ballot.fyi, an online voter guide dedicated to explaining the issues in a nonpartisan way. To his surprise, it reached 125,000 people in 24 hours, and a million over the course of the election.

For the last year, he and his cofounder Yvonne Leow have been working on the next iteration, By The Bay. Thanks to a grant from the Knight Foundation, they’re helping inform younger voters. “We’re committed to turning residents into citizens by educating them on local issues and elections,” he says.

We chatted with Jimmy about how he and Yvonne designed the guide, what he’s working on for November, and how you can replicate the process.

1. Your guide looks a lot different from the boring, I mean, um, more basic, civic materials we’re used to seeing. What can design bring to a voter guide?

By putting design first, and pairing it with a casual voice, we’re hoping we can make topics like legislation engaging. As consumers, we expect a user experience to have thought behind it, but that’s not something we’re used to seeing in voter guides. We want to make this information digestible, first by making the guide as beautiful and usable as possible, and second by using approachable language.

We assume the reader is smart, but isn’t yet familiar with all the wonky terms in politics, like general obligation bond. Other guides tell you how to vote. We want people to understand what they’re voting on and make their own decision.

Proposition 7: Makes permanent daylight savings, meaning we don't change the clock twice a year.

2. What was your process, and how did you avoid partisanship?

Like any good journalist, we’re first focused on understanding as much as possible, from as many sides as possible. This means reading all relevant materials and talking to people in the orbit of each issue.

Local issues are less polarizing and ideological than national politics, so avoiding bias is easier than you might think. After we’ve done all the research, my cofounder and I are often more conflicted on where we stand on the issues personally.

We design the information to make it easy to process. If it makes sense to visualize something, we’ll create a graphic rather than explaining it with words. After I published ballot.fyi and it blew up, I received many emails suggesting corrections. As stressful as it was, I took it as an opportunity to debate the sender and absorb their knowledge and perspective.

3. What did you want to give voters in your community that wasn't already out there?

In the past, I’ve left a voting booth feeling ashamed that I was sometimes guessing on how to vote. I consider myself well-educated, but I needed to be a better educated citizen. I suspect a lot of people feel that way.

Proposition 10: Perhaps one of the most consequential initiatives, it would allow cities to enact rent control laws again. There's a huge fight from all sides about whether this is a good idea.

4. What design constraints did you need to think about?

Brevity is our primary constraint, but we also do our best to make everything mobile-friendly, because 60 percent of people will visit our site on their phone. Even if they don’t read through an entire explainer, we write our content so that people can understand both sides within a few sentences.

Above all else, we design for the busy professional, who is educated and well-intentioned, but may not have time to fully research everything themselves. We try to get to the point as quickly as possible, make navigation as easy as possible, and have fun with the content.

We picture our users as three personas: One is the diligent voter who spends hours on their absentee ballot well before election day rolls around. Another is the voter who knows they have to vote on Tuesday, so they’re going to spend some time looking into it the weekend before. Then there’s the oh-shit voter who, on election day, doesn’t want to feel stupid and researches as much as they can at work, then runs to the polls right before they close.

We actually see the most traffic the day before the election and the day of the election.

5. What was the hardest part about building it, and how long did it take? (San Francisco is a wacky place with a lot to vote on, so I would imagine a while?)

The hardest part of ballot.fyi was maintaining accurate and up-to-date information. It was just me, and it’s all manual, so I was debating people via email, researching as much as I could, and trying to wordsmith it all to be as succinct and understandable as possible.

Ballot.fyi took about three months, from concept to election day—roughly a month of design, a month of coding and design, and a month of maintenance and advertising. Knowing 20,000-30,000 people were seeing my site every day made October 2016 the most stressful and exhilarating month of my life.

Proposition 12: Mandates a minimum square footage for animals sold for meat, but there's a clause in there that makes all eggs in California cage-free (like literally, not just in minimum size) by 2022.

6. What advice would you give people in other communities about creating their own voter guide?

I’d recommend using whatever tool/medium you’re most comfortable using. You don’t have to build a whole website.

We've seen people create voter guides with Google Slides or Sheets, or simply put together a blog on Squarespace. I've also seen long FB posts, or PDFs shared around social media. The week before the election, people will be looking for the information, and different formats find different audiences. I have yet to see someone make a comprehensive and compelling YouTube series—I’d love to see that.

My best advice: Focus on a specific part of the ballot, and do it well. Don’t worry about reaching a wide audience. Write it for the people you know: your close friends, coworkers, or club soccer team. Research your way to nonpartisanship. In terms of resources, Ballotpedia is dense but can be a good starting place. When in doubt, you can also call your city hall or state government and request information. Having friends that can translate legalese is also useful.

7. What kind of feedback have you received, and what are you planning for the general election in November?

Most of our feedback is positive. I think most people want to get more involved in local politics and understand more, but people are busy and other things take priority.

For November, we’re interviewing the Supervisor candidates in San Francisco and posting the videos. We’re hoping it’s an easy way for residents to quickly get a sense of who’s running and what they stand for. We’re also beefing up a feature we released in June—the ability to take notes on our webpages and then share that with your friends via a private link. We’ve noticed that people rely on their friends to vote, and friends typically have one or two people who are their go-to political person. We want to empower those individuals and compile the research and summarize for them, so they can simply add their commentary and recommendations. By The Bay does not give recommendations, but we encourage individuals to—it helps get the vote out.

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As the 2016 election approached, and the vitriol around the presidential race grew, IDEO alum and engineer Jimmy Chion wanted to do something to keep voters engaged.

I help organizations cut through complexity by shaping how they show up, through brand strategy, identity, and storytelling.

Working at the intersection of brand and business, I bring an editorial eye and a bias toward making—turning ideas into tangible experiences that people can understand, trust, and believe in.

My work spans government, healthcare, financial services, media, and consumer goods, from launching Gen Z-focused ventures to building innovation labs and reimagining legacy brands. I relish moments of ambiguity and enjoy translating across teams, perspectives, and priorities to move ideas forward.

I started my career in editorial and digital design, shaping cross-platform experiences and identity systems in publishing and agency environments. That foundation still shapes how I work today: I’m detail-oriented, collaborative, and overreliant on the Oxford comma. I hold a BFA in Visual Communication from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

For 25 years, I've asked the same question: Who does this design exclude—and what are we going to do about it?

My work spans human-centered strategy, inclusive design, and qualitative research, with clients ranging from Microsoft, Google, and Verizon to the National Science Foundation, and San Francisco Unified School District.

Before IDEO, I taught elementary school in East Palo Alto and spent a decade doing design work with social service organizations—where I learned firsthand what it costs people when systems are built without them in mind.

I am currently writing User Error, a nonfiction book about digital access and the design decisions behind it. I live in Oakland, California.

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My expertise spans brand, communication, and product design across tech, education, the arts, and social impact.

I believe great work demands both high-level vision and obsessive attention to detail, and only happens through collaboration.

I bring an inclusive, hands-on approach and a deep understanding of business, which enables me to consistently deliver excellence while always asking why.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at the brand firms Pentagram and VSA Partners. I began my career as a designer, leading teams at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Milwaukee Art Museum. I hold an MFA in graphic design from Maryland Institute College of Art and a BFA in communication design from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, and have taught at some of the best design schools in the US.

I am responsible for IDEO’s long-term success in China and working with clients to use design as a tool to enable growth. Specifically, I have helped Chinese companies design holistic brand solutions through the development of their products, communication, services, and innovation teams, and I have helped multinationals expand their presence and influence in China.

I advise global leaders on developing China-led innovation and capabilities.

In over 15 years in IDEO Shanghai, I have worked on projects that use design to elevate the quality of the experience of healthcare products and services, streamline processes that increase productivity, create spaces and programs that promote and enable inclusive communities, and build next generation mobility solutions that are planet-positive.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at Philips Electronics and the Electrolux Group in Italy, the Netherlands, and Singapore on a number of breakthrough commercial products. I am a member of the Young President Organization in Shanghai.