at the intersection of UX and code

stand for quality, detail, and thoughtfulness.

ShockTalk app

ShockTalk

Co-Founder & Product Owner

Fall 2019 - Present

ShockTalk is a culturally tailored telemental health platform designed to serve Indigenous communities and address unresolved historical and intergenerational trauma, regardless of recognition status. The platform’s vision is to create a comprehensive network of Indigenous mental health providers, including clinicians, traditional healers, peers, and elders. Through an extensive customer discovery process across Indian Country, we developed multiple prototypes that were validated as accessible and culturally resonant by participants.

HIPAA COMPLIANCE CENTER

Developer & HIPAA Security Officer

2025 - Present

Managed HIPAA-compliant hosting can run $500 a month or more — untenable for an underfunded telehealth platform like ShockTalk. So I built ShockTalk's HIPAA compliance directly on Azure's HIPAA tooling, paired with an automated compliance center: deterministic checks across the codebase and infrastructure run daily, Claude Opus audits everything for compliance drift monthly, and git-tracked policies are re-signed in-portal whenever reality changes.

WOCCONWAKER

Creator — Design & Engineering

2025 - Present

WocconWaker assists the learning and revitalization of Woccon, a dormant language historically spoken by Waccamaw people. Its AI agent turns scattered scholarship into an interactive teacher — answering questions about vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation — while drawing every answer from a deterministic, community-reviewed database rather than guessing. The result is the most comprehensive Woccon resource available today.

UIC WEBSITE REDESIGN

Project Lead

Summer 2024 - Spring 2025

Urban Indigenous Collective (UIC) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit based in New York City. I led a full redesign of the website to enhance the user experience as the organization entered a new chapter of growth. The new design strategically uses whitespace to balance the presentation of information-heavy content, including projects, community resources, and text-based materials, while introducing a fresh aesthetic inspired by plant medicine. The redesign was completed in Framer; production implementation was paused when funding for the build did not materialize.

CASE STUDY

AI POLICY ANALYZER

Full Stack Dev, Project Lead

Winter 2024 - Winter 2025

To support Urban Indigenous Collective's (UIC) activism and advocacy surrounding the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons (MMIP) crisis, I designed an AI-powered policy tracker which simplifies the tracking of MMIP legislation. Built with a user-friendly interface, the tool enables non-technical users to efficiently pull data from Legiscan, analyze legislation through ChatGPT-4 using culturally tailored questions, and export the results for UIC’s MMIP Policy Tracker. My focus was on enhancing organizational efficiency by creating an intuitive experience that automates a previously manual process, streamlining decision-making and maximizing impact.

CASE STUDY

ABILITIES

"Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."

-Steve Jobs

design practice

  • User research
  • Interaction design
  • Prototyping
  • Design systems
  • Content design

tools

  • Sketch
  • Figma
  • Framer
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • Cursor
  • Claude Code
  • React Native
  • JavaScript
  • Python

languages

  • English (native)
  • Spanish
view resume

AUSTIN SERIO

product designer · social impact

As an Indigenous product designer, I build for communities that equity forgot — with the clarity, craft, and imagination that made the iPhone change how the world thinks about technology. Indian Country deserves that bar too. ShockTalk, my flagship project, began with 70+ research sessions across Indian Country; I translated what we heard into interaction flows, community voice and content design, and a glass-morphism design system I shipped pixel-for-pixel in React Native. The app is HIPAA-compliant, live on the App Store, and backed by MIT Solve, Headstream, and Blackstone LaunchPad.

process blog