John Pechacek

about me

The part of design I like most is the research end. I want to understand why someone makes a decision, and I enjoy discovering the gap between what people actually need and what they say they want. The work in this portfolio mostly lives in that gap: research that reframed how a company understood a problem, and a feature built around what hunters do rather than what they asked for.

I’ve spent the last decade doing this for products I believe make a real difference in people’s lives. Good education opens doors that would otherwise stay closed, and that’s what drew me to Istation. I’ve never hunted, but I found the same pull at Moultrie, designing tools that get people into the woods and help them pay close attention to the natural world. It turns out you don’t need to share your users’ passion to take it seriously. You need to be curious enough to learn why it matters to them.

If there’s a thread through my career, it’s working the seams between disciplines. My background is in animation and motion design, which taught me not just how movement enhances an experience but when it gets in the way. I spent a year as a front-end engineer at Istation, building the kinds of designs I used to hand off, and I’ve never communicated with developers the same way since. The most interesting problems live in those seams, and they don’t get solved by anyone who stays on their own side.

I live in Birmingham, Alabama with my wife, two boys, and a dog. I play video games and tell myself it counts as research.