United States

UX Design

Graphic Design

UI/ Visual Design

Product Design

Customer Experience (CX)

UX writing

Interaction Design

Growth Design

UX Research

Graphic Design Credits

Bachelor of Fine Arts (B.F.A.)

✊🏿🏳️‍🌈 Diversity & Inclusion

Kristian Dela Cruz

Senior UX Designer

Collaboration

Problem-solving

Team player

Leadership

Accessibility

Content research

Figma

Adobe Creative Suite

Introduce yourself, define mentoring expectations and goals. Learn and grow together.

General mentorship

How to think about design career paths and what progression looks like for designers?

Design career path

Navigating the working relationship with PM's and engineers as a designer.

Working with product and engineering

Building delightful experiences for data center interconnection services for Equinix Fabric.

📸 Amazon Photos - Personalization and Acquisition 
• Leading growth, managing design strategy, research and design for Amazon Photos — the goal is to scale customer adoption globally for all Amazon surfaces.
• Building and managing relationships cross-functionally with Engineering Managers and Product Management to connect complex design challenges. 
• Enable and experiment metric driven designs and priorities across all horizontals on iOS, Android, Web, Desktop, Fire Tablet, Fire TV, and Echo Show.

The University of Miami Division of Continuing and International Education's digital skills bootcamps help students launch their careers into innovative digital fields. The UX/UI Design Professional Bootcamp offers a comprehensive curriculum committed to providing learners with the experience, support, and confidence learners need to enter the growing and
exciting field of Ul/UX Design.

As an instructor, I remotely led a diverse class of 14+ students to teach and coach them the knowledge of design, human centered design and technology. Additionally, students will go through introduction to design, tool workshops, storytelling courses and presentations to build their knowledge as a UX Designer. 

As a instructor, I facilitated hands-on instruction using Figma and other design software, constructive feedback sessions, and self-directed research to ensure those who complete the program are ready to respond as the design landscape grows and market demands continue to evolve.

Class info:
• 89% of students passed the April 2022 cohort
• 40+ hours of instructional hours with students 
• Compliments from Instructional Advisors - “Great connection on providing real world experience during conversations”
• ~40% student conversion to extended courses for immersive UX learning (career changing courses) 
• Human-centered leadership to provide a psychologically safe environment for learning.

🔀 Microsoft Security, Identity - Lifecycle workflows
• Successfully launched a ~$1 billion investment for Microsoft Security product from the ground up (discovery, research, ideation, delivery) as its sole Founding Designer on a 20+ member team in Atlanta.
• Accelerated a culture of design thinking with a highly-technical engineering team that resulted on empathetic and customer-obsessed collaboration.
• Influenced design prioritization efforts with Product Managers and Engineer Managers that was data-driven from usability testing and research. 
• Established design leadership and executed design priorities— that resulted enabling 12+ global companies for preview.
• Impacted new React design patterns that influenced teams to adopt on their products.
• Sole Lead Designer influencing human-centered design, product design strategy, and user research in automating complex identity lifecycle workflows. Resulting in weekly collaboration sessions with Product Managers and Engineers. 

Azure Identity Provisioning
• Sole Lead Designer for hybrid cloud provisioning user experiences. Executing a strategy to increase customer usage.
• Executed design and strategized a health and monitoring experience for Azure Cloud Sync.

Accessibility Lead
• Accessibility lead for the identity design team. Learning, documenting, advocating, building, and influencing accessibility needs for the Admin design system.
• Led a team of designers to holistically think about accessibility on the Azure Admin portal.
• Facilitated discussions and processes on documenting accessibility case studies.

Mentor
• Design mentor for Microsoft Reach program a 3+ month mentor program for underrepresented individuals looking to get into design, research, or content.
• Mentee’s book 30min calls twice a month from a diverse group of Microsoft Designers to gather insight, advice and long-term mentorship.

Human Centered Design 
• Enabling, educating, coaching, evangelizing and leading collaborative human centered activities within Chief Design Office.
• Lead and design a accessible and duplicatable user experience for Toolkits — allowing Designers, Product Owners, Business Partners and leadership to use reusable methods for better human centered results.

UX Mentor coaching career changers dive into UX fundamentals, guiding the importance of rigor, facilitating conversations about vulnerability and teaching the importance of thoughtful product design. 

• Led 30+ adult learners set goals, coach the importance of prioritization, influence the value of growth mindset and surface the importance of mental health in a remote educational format.

• Onboarded new students into the Careerfoundry platform and influence them to do thoughtful work.
• Evaluate multiple final tasks with 15-25 min video reviews to provide constructive feedback on designs and provide the reason or data why.

• Execute 1 hour mentoring calls that provides a 360 view conversations on the UX Design field, product design thinking, human-centered design fundamentals, visual design basics, goal setting, why visioning, work prioritization, design critiques and advocated psychological safety throughout their journey.

• Facilitated group sessions: "Advance Visual Design with Uber" "Build Amazon's navigation structure" "Week in a life of a UX Designer" and "Preparing for Portfolio Presentations for interviews for UX Designers".

• Developed and facilitated a “Early Stage Designer” panel series on Adplist.org to give designers 1 month or 1 year in their UX Design career the floor to voice their experience breaking into the field.

• Developed Figma learning modules that comprises of real world design patterns for students to dive deep on the rigor of UI, Visual, and UX design. 

The students I mentored are linked below. Please reach out if you you are interested on having them on your team.

Ralph Tullie: http://ralphtullie.com/
John Suarez: https://www.johnsuarez.co/

🟣Asurion Home+
• Led design to transform, innovate and influence human-centered design to reimagine Asurion’s Home+ claim flow— Asurion’s premiere product that protects a customers household tech.
• Led research from planning, execution, synthesis and insights gathering for leadership that resulted in understanding and empathy.
• Led design with fulfillment, product, technology and content to build a QR code and in home repair experience in ~two months. 
• Design, strategized, rigorously tested and iterated a in store repair experience. Which resulted in ~10% increase on in store repairs.
• Managed the Design teams internship program and mentored upcoming designers.

🚀Amazon
• Lead Designer that executed human centered design on a Amazon RFP that resulted in winning a multi-year ~$1million contract.
• Facilitated design workshops for North Star of the Asurion and Amazon claim experience.
• Increased product awareness on the end-to-end experience through content strategy and Visual Design. 

🖨Staples
• Design and strategized a digital experience for customers by creating email designs, Staples Web Portal Designs, Service Design, Graphic Design, user research, and content strategy. Project goals: increase customer interaction by 6% in 2019. Increase take rate of tech expert interactions on the Asurion app by 3%.
• Strategized and designed experiences on brand defining stores for future pilot Staples co-working spaces. Increase tech support engagement by 10%. Have Tech support resolution by 90%.
 
🛠The Home Depot
• Lead Designer that strategized on the future state of the Technician experience. 
• Released a 5 Star Experience Pilot to reduce resolution time from 10+ days to 5-7 days.
• Planned, led and facilitated 5+ Design workshops that focused on technician communications, service design mapping, product parts delivery and future MVP state of Home Depot. 
• Designed the UX of The Home Depot Portal and product receipt identification flow for migration efforts.

• Frontline Agent Application (Sprint, AT&T, Verizon)- Lead UX Designer to conduct user research activities and migration design solution efforts. The goal of the effort is to capture qualitative and quantitative data, discover and solution functionalities for migration efforts, provide usability testing recommendations, reports and facilitated ideation sessions to better the agent application. The team wanted to reduce customer handle times by 5% and increase frontline agents efficiency. Methods used: contextual inquiries, user interviews, surveys, journey mapping, specification documents, UI Design, design sprints, and usability testing. 

• Retail, Amazon: Lead UX Designer on winning a ~2 year ~million dollar contract with Amazon. This contract is to be an exclusive protection plan provider for Amazon customers and be Amazon's sole strategic partner for future business endeavors. With the use of empathy, reframing techniques and design workshops I influenced the team to come together and focus on the people problem of the proposal. This in return put the users upfront and was presented as the core of the proposal. User research (qualitative and qualitative), executed ethical design methods, journey mapping, persona creation, service design, customer experience design, usability testing, interaction Design, UI design, Design sprints and rapid prototyping.

• Retail and Communications: UX Designer focused on reducing call-rates to frontline agents by analyzing communication content (email, SMS, web content, triggers) on the Retail business of Asurion. Iterative monitoring and experimentation of content strategy and interaction to ensure a consistent experience throughout all channels of the customers claim status. User research, persona creation, usability testing, UX design efforts to refresh product replacement portal for Fitbit and Headphone products. Focus on reducing ~30% drop-rate on validation entry. Goal to Increase take-rate of product replacement by 10%.

BidMap, Department Of State –
Lead UX Designer through the highly visible development of a new application with the Department of State and GSA/18F. 

As the Lead UX Designer I managed, mentored Junior Designers, strategized and executed human-centered Design methodologies and UI Design process on the creation of the application. I utilized Design Studio sessions, User Research Synthesis, remote user interviews, usability testing (remote and in-person), information architecture and remote wireframe sessions. In-conjunction, I was also the Lead UI Designer that translated User research findings into high-fidelity mock ups. I rapid prototyped on InVision and Balsamiq, help ideate on a brand identity, created a style guide and help stand up a Design System for BidMap.

Instructed and created the first cohort of User Experience Design for Shepherd University's Graphic Design BFA program. 

The goal for the class is to provide fundamental knowledge of UX Design and create portfolio pieces for undergraduate students. The students will build an empathic approach on their designs and utilize analysis, ethnographic research, user research/planning, usability testing, wireframing, prototyping, presentation skills and design thinking.

Working closely with students to get a grasp of Visual Design fundamentals. During the 8 week course the class will go over researching, design user interfaces, build style guides and user experience basics. In the end of the course the students obtain a final project that has gone through numerous iterations and feedback — that will be a great supplement for their goals.

UX Designer leading numerous efforts and redesigns in the government space.

IRS.gov Redesign
Collaboration with internal IRS UXD team to redesign the entire IRS.gov website from its previous CMS to Drupal. This effort was a cross collaboration with many teams that results in a high-quality product. 
• Information Architecture, Taxonomy, Human-centered design
• Responsive web development: Front-End Development, Responsive Design.
• UX Design: User flows, Persona Creation, usability testing, usability audits. rapid prototyping (InVision),
• UI Design: Style Guide creation, style guide audits, 508 compliance, U.S Web Standards usage

Department of Labor – Scorecard Application
• Design Lead executing human-centered design, UX Design, rapid prototyping, UI Design and branding
• Worked in a fast-paced collaborative team that proactively provided the Department of Labor an interactive prototype.

National Institute of Child and Human Development – Data and Specimen Hub (DASH)
• Supporting for web application— gathering requirements for IT systems, user flows, wireframing, usability testing, rapid prototyping and logo development.

Worked in a collaborative team to provide internal Marketing team with design solutions.

Concept and Design monthly resulting e-mail pages, web banners, package design, photo retouching, Powerpoint presentations, print collateral for corporate brand and 11 sub-brands, as well as the Choice Privileges rewards program. Attend kickoff meetings for design solutions, brainstorm on design concepts, and implement.

Kristian Dela Cruz🇺🇸

About Kristian Dela Cruz

Expertise

What mentees say