About me - in a Nutshell
I’m Dolphia Arnstein, a Boston-based design leader who views UX as more than a career; it’s how I navigate the world. I believe good design makes the complicated feel clear, the overwhelming feel approachable, and the inaccessible feel welcoming. That belief led me to transition from software development into user experience, where for nearly a decade I’ve shaped how people interact with city services, digital platforms, and community resources.
At the City of Cambridge, I’ve had the unique opportunity to build design maturity from the ground up, guiding teams and departments toward more accessible, consistent, and human-centered digital experiences. But beyond the metrics and milestones, what drives me is a simple goal: making everyday interactions easier, fairer, and kinder.
Outside of work, I’m often behind a camera, capturing life’s details, experimenting with storytelling through video, or chasing after my five-year-old daughter, Anouk, around Boston Common, wherever we are in the world.
How I found UX or how UX found me (Origin Story)
I didn’t start out in design at all—I started in code.
• 2013: I moved to Boston as a software developer, writing production JavaScript for the Boston Globe after finishing a Master's in Computer Sc and Engineering and working a year in Buffalo, NY.
• The Pivot: Debugging front-end bugs put me face-to-face with people struggling to use the very tools I’d shipped. I realized my favorite part of the job wasn’t shipping code; it was watching why users stalled out and fixing it.
• 2016: I pressed pause on my dev career, enrolled at Harvard to study human-computer interaction, accessibility, and service design, and took night classes while freelancing on editorial websites to pay tuition.
• 2017–Today: The City of Cambridge hired me as its inaugural UX designer. Since then I’ve led citywide digital transformation efforts, collaborating across more than 40 departments, engineering teams, and leadership teams.
UX lets me blend the analytical discipline I honed in software with the human-centered storytelling I craved. Today, my north star is the same whether I’m prototyping a permit app or styling our backyard pergola: make complex systems feel effortless for real people.