I'm Spencer Holtaway. My goal is to make software simple and human.
Staff product designer, Head of Design
What I've been working on recently
5 iOS apps in 30 days. With AI as my engineering partner, I focused on the parts that matter most: how the mechanics support the ethical grounding and goals of each app, and the overall look, feel, polish of the user experience including performance, visual, audio and haptic design.
ChipStackAI for microchip design, inside VS Code2025 – 2026
Design can save the world.Design can save the world.
The constraint
ChipStack is an AI tool for chip designers. It reads through decades of documentation, some of it older than the people using it, and catches problems before they reach silicon. It was built by engineers, for engineers, inside a VS Code panel. ChipStack wanted to inject modern user experience principles to their product.
The work
Along with high level architecture and storytelling design decisions to improve feature findability and user flow, I developed an action bar that shows contextually relevant controls and easy access to agent interaction. The bar can be invoked and operated entirely by keyboard or mouse, and automatically gets out of the way when not in use.
The insight
The obvious move would have been to center the design around ChipStack's chat capabilities, but in microchip design, context is key for designers, so an augmented, optional experience is far more suitable for the user. ChipStack was acquired by Cadence in late 2025.
02
My Bus SFiOS$0.99
An app that wants you to leave.An app that wants you to leave.
The constraint
This is a project of self-restraint. It’s hard to find a transit app that does one thing well, and that was my frustration as a daily commuter in SF from 2010–2019. 3+ taps to find the simple information I needed, then surprise subscription plans showing up when I found one I liked.
The solution
Originally released in 2014, the solution was to create a simple list for daily transit users: the buses they take every day, from the bus stops they go to every day. No extras. A bus app truly designed for the daily commute.
The insight
Keeping a strong opinion on features when an API can do basically anything is harder than it sounds. Apple’s SDKs in the last 10 years have made this simple solution even more powerful with widgets and live activities: features worth adding, unlike trip planning.
Retention, for people who came here to relax.Retention, for people who came here to relax.
The challenge
Calm was facing churn challenges as the mindfulness industry took a downturn in the months following the 2020 pandemic. With a growth veteran leading the product team, we transitioned our energy from content-focused development to growth-focused development.
Simple on the surface
While the end result is a simple daily engagement pattern, it was important to engage users in deep research to ensure we chose the right path for users from a plethora of strategies and tactics generated from company-wide workshops led by yours truly.
What people felt
Weekly engagement lifted to healthy levels. UX research participants and reviewers enjoyed the addition of encouraging reminders and a low effort way to keep to their intention of using Calm daily.
Five more.
1 / 5
04Calm for Business2026
A dashboard that lives up to the name.
An HR admin should feel what they just bought.
05FlightAware2025
Dark mode, for good reason.
A beloved brand of mine, redesigned.
06ParentSquare2025
Designed for the messages nobody designs.
Making endless school communications digestible.
07Simpler PG&E Outages2025
Less map. More battery.
One progress meter for your outage, built to use as little of your battery as it can.
08CA Divorce Disclosures WorkbookHoltaway Design
From scrappy PDFs to SaaS, for people who are hurting.
Divorce isn’t easy, but this makes it easier.
Career.
No domain is my domain.
Telephony, rideshare, meditation, games, microchip design. Design never changes: I absorb the complexity so the person using it doesn't have to.
2025 – 2026ChipStack · Product & brand, head-of-design trackI asked the dumb question in a room of PhDs for months.Regular user research with microchip designers led to simple solutions for complex problems.
2023 – 2024Red9 · Product & brandI designed myself out of a job.A full design system including responsive page elements and dashboard widget components allowed the client to iterate on their site long after the engagement.
2020 – 2024Calm · Staff Product Designer, ConsumerGrowth hacked, for people who came here to relax.Careful communication and deep research meant growth didn’t have to look like a notification center full of nags and guilt.
2020 – 2022Calm for Business · Staff Product Designer, zero-to-oneThe least glamorous work I'm proudest of.A zero-to-one project with a tiny team and very little internal visibility turned into a huge revenue source.
2016 – 2020Dialpad · Head of DesignHow to modernize a plane while it's flying.From an employee phone system for small businesses to enterprise-grade, AI-enabled communication platform for sales, support and large distributed teams. In 4 years.
2014 – 2016Shuddle · Senior UX Designer, rideshare for familiesWhere I learned how to design software instead of screens.Working with a small team on multi-family, multi-leg carpools meant I had to go deep with back end engineers to understand how every UI change snowballed on the back end in order to create a service for busy families that felt like an assist and not a chore.
2010 – 2014Zynga · Lead UI Designer, Words With Friends and BoggleWorked With FriendsTranslated my graphic design background to UI and UX and learned how to work with and balance the needs of design, engineering and product management. Shipped Words With Friends for iPad and many more with friends products and projects.
2003 – 2010Central Saint Martins, then agencies · Visual communication, spatial and printType first. Screens later.Created live marketing experiences for Orange Telecom, Samsung, Skype, HSBC and American Express.
Me.
Emotive design for the agentic age.
I love making things that are truly appreciated by the people who use them. The products I enjoy most augment human behavior appropriately, without pushing their own agenda.
Before I moved to San Francisco, I designed experiences in the real world, trade show stands, corporate events and PR stunts, the kind of thing you walk into, hear, smell, touch or see.
While there’s a throughline from this to domains like games and wellness, I keep the user’s emotive response as a key consideration in every industry I work in: anti-anxiety, pro-relief.
Service and systems
Ten years building software for specialists. Telephony, microchip design, the stressed and anxious. People who know how complex their problems are, and need a design lens to help achieve their goals more easily.
Craft
It all started with Hypercard stacks in 1986. I trained in typography under Phil Baines at Central Saint Martins, and broke out into experiential marketing as a graduate. The balance of high craft and rich experience design is the constant in my career.
Building to be better
I hate to see people build for building’s sake. If we’re not learning from what we build or building to deliver something we know will be valuable to customers (through research), I’ll be the one in the room to say we’re on the wrong path.
Mentorship
Head of Design at Dialpad, Staff Designer at Calm. Growing designers and sharing my 20+ years of experience has been as much of the job as shipping great products.
The most I can charge you is 99 cents.
MyBus SF and Breath Body are 99 cents with no subscription: not because they’re “only worth $0.99” but because my belief is simple solutions deserve simple, honest pricing as opposed to the mental gymnastics “less than a cup of coffee” or subscription plans cause potential customers.
They asked for engagement. I gave them permission to leave.
We were asked to growth-hack a wellness app. So we made something that encourages the right amount of achievement and doesn’t rely on guilt to garner engagement. Encouragement and being ok with being an imperfect human is great; nagging and a sense of dread from under-achievement is not.
I took the AI job that uses less water.
In early 2025 I had mixed feelings about the AI boom and was hesitant to be a part of it without really thinking about the why. ChipStack helps designers make more efficient chips. Better chips need less cooling, which means less water and less power. That’s a product I could get behind.
