Product Designer Who Codes

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I'm a user-driven product designer with a background in frontend engineering and a passion for crafts. My best work is done combining business needs, user feedback and technical scope, creating simple solutions for complex problems.

Work

Head of Design @ eola

Nov 17 - Present

From user journeys, card sorting exercises and creating personas to marketing assets and implementing the behaviour of React components into Storybook, I am the UX/UI team of one at eola.

Since the very first MVP, I kept a close relationship to users, personally interviewing both centre owners and instructors to understand their day to day struggles from the start, converting a pen and paper issue to a digital platform that works with them until now, a big CRUD app that scales with their businesses, maintaining that user feedback through communication with customer support and sales teams.

I established a design process that evolved as the team grew from 3 to 13 people. I created a Sketch Library and a living style guide, both static in Rails initially and now on Storybook as we moved to React.

I work closely with the CEO for business needs, CTO to be aware of the resources and Customer Success Manager to understand the user’s pains and struggles. I then create project scopes, balancing impact on business and user experience while being resource and time-efficient. Then execute them in stages and track success over time, which helps prioritising iterations over other parallel projects, putting efforts where the users need it most.

Frontend Architect @ Moteefe

Nov 2016 - Nov 2017

Moteefe had been growing for years with their MVP Rails app and had reached a point it needed a rebuild, which they took as a chance to redesign the entire platform. Initially hired as a UI developer to lead and manage the frontend side of things, Moteefe had hired the agency BEAR for the rebrand, but they hadn’t considered the redesign of the UI nor the UX. When I came in I recommended doing so, and my role shifted to leading the redesign of the UX and UI of the entire platform, which ended up lasting a year.

I put together a team of React developers and UI designers, worked with the product manager, CEO and CTO to put together the UX redesign, break it into stages, and build it into a renewed UI that matched the branding from BEAR, building a React component library using Storybook that we could iteratively deploy into the app.

UI engineer @ R/GA for dyson

Aug 2016 - Nov 2016

I was the browser personification for the UX/UI redesign of dyson on their move to the digital age. R/GA London got commissioned with leading dyson’s digital transition and they needed someone that could think like a browser to ponder and participate on their design thinking.

My day to day consisted on brainstorming ideas with designers, picturing how they could be doable in the browser, and then putting them into practice to the pass them onto Deloitte for a production build.

I also participated in the creation of the Dyson Flow System, the pattern library that would represent the dyson brand throughout web, physical, digital and printed media.

Head of Frontend @ Base Creative

Oct 2014 - Mar 2016

Initially hired as frontend developer and my first job in London after a few years freelancing in Spain, I quickly grew at Base, developing websites while introducing modern frontend tools like pre-processing assets, Sass, mobile-first responsive design and reusable components.

At this stage I developed a strong passion for web performance, as it seemed democratically demanding to make web experiences as fast as possible, for everyone. I developed localFont, a solution for faster and better font-loading experiences, which is now used by resources like Smashing Magazine and the ustwo studio, and sass-vary, a Sass theming solution that is now used by The Times.

Education

Responsive UX Workshop @ Smashing Conf

September 2015 - By Marko Dugonjić in Freiburg, Germany

I’ve always considered Smashing Magazine a top resource for learning about web experiences and their development. In this workshop I learned about fast prototyping and user journeys from Marko, a UX designer at Smashing Magazine.

Responsive Patterns Workshop @ Smashing Conf

December 2014 - By Brad Frost in Whistler, Canada

Brad Frost always seemed to combine the best of patterns, frontend and design in his talks. I was lucky to meet Brad at a conference about the web in 2010, and couldn’t resist attending this workshop when I won the Smashing Magazine Mystery Riddle in 2014.

While I had already used Pattern Lab by Brad Frost at the time, in this workshop I learned a ton about how to release pattern changes into your app without surprising users, and gave me incredible insight on naming patterns correctly for the team, which is not an easy task.

IT engineering @ University of Oviedo

Sept 2009 - Sept 2012

While my heart and now skills are in product design, it was only my heart 10 years ago, so I had decided to pick engineering as a degree. While I learned a lot about programming, I would say it was mostly my passion projects that brought me love. I learned C/C++, a bit of Java and Python coding, as well as some complex maths there, but I also started freelancing because on my personal time I had discovered The Web, and my passion for it made me need more.