Driftline

Driftline is a public proof of concept informed by proprietary research-product work that I cannot show directly. In that work, research scientists need a dependable process for gut-checking early ideas, collecting promising directions, developing them into sound peer-reviewed research, and eventually moving that research into products and the teams that build them.

Leadership needs a different view of the same system: enough visibility to validate direction, review roadmaps, understand capacity, and recognize who needs support before work quietly stalls.

My day-to-day work has included human-centered research, interviews, usability testing, product strategy, facilitation, UX design, and engineering. A recurring theme in that research is that people can feel as though they are working in a vacuum. When feedback from leadership is scarce, asking for help can feel like screaming into the void.

Driftline translates that insight into a public example without reproducing the proprietary product, organization, or data behind it.

I based the demonstration around Aster Bay Institute, an entirely fictional ocean-research organization. Living near Casco Bay and following scientific work in the Gulf of Maine gave me a credible imaginative setting, but I intentionally avoided pretending to represent a real institute.

The product follows research from signals and evaluation through programs and field operations. The subject matter is fictional; the need for visible movement, review, ownership, capacity, and support is not.

The central interaction is an attention queue called Waiting on You. It surfaces stalled work, identifies the current owner, states how long it has been waiting, and explains the evidence and operating rule that brought it forward. From there, a leader can offer support, assign ownership, make a pending decision, or send a human check-in.

The rules remain visible instead of disappearing behind a score or opaque AI recommendation. That transparency is meant to build trust: researchers can see why something surfaced, what will clear it, and that leadership involvement is an accountable part of the process.

I designed Driftline to feel like an instrument for technical work: tactile, precise, and quick. The side-rail navigation, compact information hierarchy, immediate responses, and restrained motion borrow from older scientific instruments without becoming nostalgic. The larger goal is to display dense information intelligently while preserving a consistent, legible system.

I created the public proof of concept from scratch, defining its workflow, fictional data, information architecture, interaction model, visual system, and working Next.js implementation. The product thinking is informed by deeper research and testing in my professional work, but Driftline itself has not been presented as a tested client product. It is a focused visual demonstration of how I approach complex operational systems.