Josephine Abbatangelo
Senior Product Designer
Movember
The Masking Tax: How Workplace Products Charge an Invisible Cost on Disabled Employees
The Masking Tax: How Workplace Products Charge an Invisible Cost on Disabled Employees
Invisible disabilities affect 1 in 5 people, yet most UX research processes, workplace tools, and design systems are built as if they don't exist. As a product designer at Movember living with an invisible disability, I've experienced the gap between how products are designed and how people like me actually use them.
This talk explores what happens when the designer is the underrepresented user. I'll share how my lived experience has reshaped the way I conduct discovery and design, challenge "standard" assumptions, and identify the patterns that consistently fail people with invisible disabilities.
Are we designing for everyone, or just the users we can see?
Josephine Abbatangelo
Josephine is a Senior Product Designer at Movember, where she designs digital experiences that support men's mental health and wellbeing. With over 10 years experience across banking, nonprofit, and digital product environments, she brings a research-grounded, end-to-end design practice to complex problems.
She is known for translating insight into clear design direction, building alignment across teams, and keeping focus on what matters most to users and the organisation.
At UX Australia 2026, she is speaking about the hidden cost that workplace products place on people with invisible disabilities and the practical design decisions that can reduce it.