I’m a Product Designer, or UI/UX Designer, with a very unusual background and experience. I started studying business in college, but due to some amazing opportunities, I found myself in UX. I think that what makes me stand out in my personality is that I’m self-taught in a lot of things and I always look for things to learn on my own, that’s how I learned English actually, without spending a dime. And several aspects of my professional day to day, I learned by myself, also when I found myself working in Marketing (long story), I got in touch with several topics that were critical to the subject, and I strived to learn about them on my own and always looked into getting myself involved with the team’s activities to learn more.
I have extensive knowledge in all tools in the business, from using open source vector tools, to Illustrator, XD, Sketch and Figma, which is the industry standard now, and have been using it since it launched.
At the moment, I’m at BRP, a Canadian company that produces sports vehicles such as snowmobiles, jet-skis, etc. I work in the analytics department, developing designs for Power BI reports. Although it’s a little far from the customer-facing products I used to work with, it has been interesting to study the interactions and particularities of the “internal customer” with a business support tool such as PBI. The needs and requirements are different, the research and construction of the user archetypes are different. It focuses more on pragmatism, the visual aspect is not as important, but the project's scopes and interactions get a much higher priority.
Research - Data gathering | Journey Mapping | Workshops
Iterating - Wireframes | Product Validation | LoFi
Design - HiFi | Prototyping | Dev Hand-off
Analytics - Flow analysis | Automated reports
After that, I got hired by Clara, a solution in business expenses for companies. I started working at the Acquisition squad, which was responsible for developing features that enabled more users to join the company and made their first interactions on the platform as hassle free as possible. After that I joined the Payments squad specifically for Brazil, where I developed a few complementary features for the main product of that squad which was the Digital Account, bringing some banking features to the platform. I worked on features that offered and tracked investment returns to the users, and on collaterals for an increased credit card limit, among others. But my main focus was on developing Pix, for the account, which is a unique method to make payments and receive money here in Brazil, with all of its requirements tracked by the Central Bank, sadly I never got to finish it, but it was looking great! You can also find it in my portfolio.
Research - Workshops | Journey Mapping | User Interviews | Benchmarking
Iterating - Wireframes | Product Validation | LoFi
Design - HiFi | Prototyping | Dev Hand-off
Analytics - FullStory | Flow analysis | Automated reports
With the company sold, the buyer already had a similar tool built, and no room in their design team. So I was brought to the LATAM Marketing team. There I learned to work with Webflow, Google Analytics, Hotjar, and a lot of other tools. While strange for a career in design, I enjoyed it, since I think it has brought me invaluable first hand knowledge of analytics and how to turn data into actionable items, something paramount to the quantitative portion of UX.
Web Design - Webflow | Page designs | Maintenance
Lead Attraction - Forms | Automation | CRM Integrations
Analytics - Google Analytics | Google Tag Manager | Facebook Pixel
Back from the US, I got hired by Hubster, to help build the app from the ground up, which was a tool to aggregate the orders from several providers in a single platform, with some light ERP tools. There I went through several cycles of development, created the Design System and managed hand offs with the devs, all by myself. Later I was joined by other designers and we formed a team. We went on to create a lot of features, before the company was sold, and my trajectory changed drastically.
Research - Journey Mapping | User Interviews | Benchmarking
Iterating - Wireframes | Product Validation | LoFi
Design - HiFi | Prototyping | Dev Hand-off
Testing - Beta testing groups organization | Test conducting
I got the opportunity to work at the same company, same team, but in the United States. Spent a year there on a 2nd internship, working on mostly the same types of tasks, but also with a little bit more responsibility. The main project was a proposal for a new homepage for the Dremel brand, in a lifestyle brand concept, which can be found in my portfolio.
Web Design - Internal Social Media Interfaces | Custom Pages
Digital Design - Presentations | Marketing Materials | Custom Assets
My first real job, I got the opportunity to work in a big German company as an intern. Dealt with my first design tasks, interfaces for communities within the “internal social media” of the company, kind of like an endomarketing tool. Also worked on presentations for the team, graphic materials (even designed a T-shirt!) and also some light front end tasks, in their intranet.
Web Design - Internal Social Media Interfaces | Custom Pages
Digital Design - Presentations | Marketing Materials | Custom Assets
A payment feature in the BR popular Pix method, which was to be implemented into Clara's new BR digital account. Prototype and documentation within.
An online platform that existed to consolidate a restaurant's online food orders in a single place. With options to interact with these orders, such as status changes, cancelling and more. Also had a few light ERP features.
A case study in a platform to create marketing communications (emails, messages, etc) using AI prompts to generate content. Also includes an interface to create email flows to integrate to CRMs.
I think it's best to give an example. In one of the companies I worked for, it was always an uphill battle to get our decisions approved. One of our wins was establishing an interview process with our customer relations department, they would provide people, we would interview them (not ideal, but that's what we had). And in those interviews we learned a lot, especially about the order in which our features were being developed. Most of the features they asked, were already planned, but in a different priority, so the most requested features would come after other features. That actually helped us to develop those requested features more deeply, since we had a little bit more time with the prioritization. We also made sure to ask about those features that they used in our competitors, and how they used it, so we could map out the interaction flow better. To summarize, the result was a better preparation stage, with better mapped flows, mapped expectations from the users and context.
I would note the most recent experience, which was changing squads at Clara. I was in the Acquisition squad, which dealt with growth and user engagement to the Payments BR squad, which was developing a digital account for BR, there I dealt with financial products and payments, and we were developing Pix for the digital account (for those not in BR, Pix is a payment method controlled by our Central Bank, really quick, easy to use and safe, and everyone uses it), which would be a real game changer for the company. Unfortunately I didn’t get to see the end of this project, but it was approved by the founders and it was looking like a smooth hand off. I also worked on products that brought a lot of value to our customers, including a solution to bring more assets under management to the company in under 15 days.
With "internal clients'' or stakeholders. In my last job, there was a problem with company-wide consistency in design, since processes were confusing and not well defined, everyone tended to follow or create their own, so that can lead to many inconsistencies, not only visually, but also on experience and interactions. That made the CTO centralize all approval flows on him, someone with "particular" design notions. And my highest moment there was having my Pix prototype (which you can take a look at the link I provided) approved, with minimal pushback. That was a gigantic team effort and me and the PM worked closely and held several rounds of testing and discussion with the rest of the design team and the product owners, so we compiled all feedback, discusses finer points and reached conclusions that were enough to create a proposal in the form of a prototype, of course that didn't end it there, we would still need to go through several rounds of testing and further refinement, but this short story just serves to illustrate how dealing with feedback is an integral part of any designer's work, and I have dealt with it in the past.
Yeah, if this page was not proof enough. I lived in the US for a year in 2017, also I've been working in English heavy environments since my first job. My last job at Clara (a Mexican company) had English as it's main language, since it not only had Mexican employees, but also people from all over LATAM, including Brazil, so English was the common denominator and used freely. I have experience in presenting projects and arguments in English, I'm no stranger in defending my points and expanding discussions in that language.