About
Designing clarity into complex systems.
I’m Gina Coburn, Ph.D., a product-minded designer with 15+ years translating complex, technical, and regulated systems into clear, staged, user-centered experiences — across education, workforce, and technology-enabled platforms.
I’m the founder and CEO of Nerrative, an AI-powered venture later supported by NSF funding, where I lead product thinking, AI-assisted design workflows, technical collaboration, and accessibility-centered experience strategy for a web platform. I’ve also served as a Title V instructional designer and accessibility lead, and I’ve designed learning experiences at scale in Canvas and interactive products in Storyline.
What I specialize in
How I work
I start by framing the real problem, not the requested feature. I map the whole journey, then sequence it — deciding what a person can safely ignore and when. I make decisions legible so engineers can build directly from them, and I design the in-between states (empty, pending, returning) that most experiences forget.
I move fast without sacrificing craft: prototype to show ideas rather than talk about them, then let feedback and evidence shape what ships.
How I use AI responsibly
I use AI-assisted workflows throughout ideation, interaction copy, flow exploration, and content modeling — as an accelerant, not an author. AI widens the option space; human judgment decides what’s accurate, usable, and ethical enough to ship.
That means honest states over fake precision, no dark patterns, and a clear line between what the system knows and what it’s guessing.
How accessibility shapes my work
Accessibility is a design input for me, not a final audit. As an accessibility lead (WCAG, Section 508, UDL), I build the accessible choice into templates and defaults so it scales across many contributors — and so the experience adapts to the person instead of the reverse. It’s a lens I carry into every product decision.
What makes me different
I bridge product thinking, AI-assisted workflows, accessibility, and technical collaboration — and I’ve repeatedly turned genuinely complex, high-stakes subject matter into experiences people can actually use. I design for both the end user and the engineers building it.
See how I think →