Elena Petrova

Elena is an interaction designer at Kestrow, working on the reporting tools finance teams use every day. She learned early that a prototype full of tidy sample data hides most of the problems: names that wrap, numbers that run to eight digits, tables with four hundred rows.

Her talk shows how she builds prototypes from exported production data, in a spreadsheet, a small script or a code sandbox, and what that revealed in three recent projects. The techniques are deliberately low-tech, so any designer can try them the following Monday.