Sweden

Graphic Design

UX Design

UI/ Visual Design

Branding and Identity Design

Product Design

Front-end

5y pre-Bologna bachelor's degree

Design (EU-II)

✊🏿🏳️‍🌈 Diversity & Inclusion

Tiago Almeida

UX Design Lead (Design System)

Youtube

Medium

Bento

Communication

Collaboration

Problem-solving

Time management

Empathy

Organisation skills

Leadership

Project management

Analytical skills

Accessibility

Python

React

Figma

HTML

JavaScript

Adobe Creative Suite

Joining an amazing team of Designers who work to make your mobile app User Experience as exciting but also as trustworthy as your Volvo vehicle.

My personal contribution will be towards systematizing and scaling Design work via a Design System and other design tooling.

Working with a talented and diverse Design Ops team to scale and uplevel close to one hundred Designers.

Applying a User-Centered mindset to improve tools and processes. 

Leveraging user-friendly documentation, flexible and easy-to-use templates, automation of repetitive tasks, teaching, and coaching.

I was laid off along with the entire Product department at Transfer Galaxy.

Some of the side projects that kept me busy while I looked for my next full-time challenge:

• Swedish Design Systems directory → https://swedishdesignsystems.se

• Free Job-hunt tracker™ Notion template → https://youtu.be/tbGQ6UWTBtI

• Auto-layout Twitter Card on the Figma community → https://bit.ly/auto-layout-twitter-card

• Style/token documentation components™ library and automation → https://youtu.be/FfsFSqB_pJo

• The Product Designer Collection™ → https://bit.ly/the-prod-design-collection

• Design Feedback Jam™ template for FigJam → https://figma.com/community/file/1236238312367627248

At Transfer Galaxy, I worked closely with the Head of Design, the Design team, and several stakeholders to scale up design, product, and engineering practices.

While managing and implementing the Design System was one of my primary responsibilities, I focused much of my time on Design Operations.

Applying a UX Research mindset, I conducted many informal interviews with several people in the organization to detect needs, pains, and alignment/collaboration issues. I also researched tools, processes, and guidelines that we could use to address the team's needs and power up the organization's workflows.

With the help of my Product Operations peer and the teams, we established healthy communication habits, like mindful, open, and transparent usage of Slack, to spread information, knowledge, and status via Slack. We also introduced asynchronous video (via Loom) to reduce misunderstandings and include those that had a rougher time reading long posts and documents.

I was also responsible for the creation of a #praise Slack channel. Here anyone is welcome to celebrate their colleague's achievements, foster a culture of mutual appreciation, and contribute to psychological safety.

I'm also incredibly proud of having designed the Transfer Galaxy Design Feedback Jam template for FigJam. It allowed us to kick off the practice of design critiques after eight years of design without a proper feedback process. It's still available on the Figma community, where 150+ designers worldwide have downloaded it.

Lastly, I served designers as a Design Manager and mentor/coach, contributing to their professional growth and leveling-up of design and soft skills.

NOTE: I was laid off with the entire Product department (and other smaller functions).

Working with a cross-functional team on the Gloss Design System (part of Klarna's wider Design System). It was compromised of several multi-brand Figma libraries, covering everything from design tokens, modular and highly flexible re-usable components, page, and asset creation templates. 

I collaborated with developers to implement a React component framework, where even props matched the component properties that designers had available. 

Also created documentation for designers, developers, and other stakeholders. It included guidelines ranging from color, type, design patterns, motion, and accessibility. It included video content where I explained the Design System usage and demos of how to use components, templates, and tips/tricks to gain super-speed as a Designer.

Employed plugins and system thinking to optimize workflows on the Design System creation and maintenance end. For instance, the color and typography documentation for our three brand themes was fully automated. All thanks to several automations I implemented using the Automator plugin for Figma.

In one year, we went from having 37+ hard-to-create/maintain WordPress websites to one Contentful instance with multiple countries and languages under one roof. It allowed us to design and implement sites for Klarna, Kosma, and Sofort in a matter of days (previously, it meant weeks/months of work).

Finally, I programmed Klarna Notes, the first Figma widget at Klarna (albeit not the first plugin).

Humbly contributing to leveling-up the current and next generation of designers (over 100 individuals and 3 000h of mentoring).

Find me at https://adplist.org/mentors/tiago-almeida

As part of the design and cross-functional agile teams, I contributed to improving the experience of creating engaging and interactive presentations/surveys and reducing presenter stress for diverse user segments. 

My work ranged from conducting user research, insights gathering, defining/prioritizing user stories with Product Managers, and working closely with developers (sometimes jumping into code) and stakeholders to achieve a seamless user experience for presenters and audiences. We achieved this by prototyping early for stakeholder alignment and internal/external usability testing. 

I was also a primary contributor to the Ragnar Design System in Figma and the React component framework.

I was laid off from my role at Stravito due to the uncertainty surrounding COVID-19.

During this time, I ran the Design Hiring in Sweden survey, which collected hundreds of answers from recruiters, hiring managers, and other stakeholders involved in recruiting. 

The outcome was a detailed analysis of what design candidates need to know when applying for design jobs in Sweden.

You can read all about it at https://bit.ly/design-hiring-sweden

Worked both as part of the design team and as a code touching member of the search features development team to allow insights and marketing teams in companies like Danone, Electrolux, Pepsi Lipton, and McDonald's to find all the practical internally generated and even external research, allowing them to make better product and business decisions.

As in most of my career, my role was very flexible, and I contributed to a lot of different areas of the company, from helping to save the new website launch deadline by fixing the CSS and Hubspot templates (first week on the job), to being part of the definition of the Stravito design playbook, improving the Figma design library and even drafting a full-blown Design System strategy.

As part of development team sprints and all ceremonies, I ensured that the design for new features was made before code implementation. Following the team development process, I actively contributed to frontend fixes, from pull requests to peer review and feature merging.

I also kickstarted a culture of prototyping new designs with HTML, CSS, and JS so that we could have better stakeholder feedback and detect necessary UX and UI changes earlier.

Last but not least, I helped generate two new product features as the result of a Hackathon, drag and drop of documents and media into collections and voice search (implemented a fully working prototype leveraging the new native Web Speech API, with both voice recognition and text synthesizing for spoken result summaries).

NOTE: Sadly, as one of the last employees recruited, I was laid off, along with another fifth of my amazing colleagues, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

To further Medpeople's goal of bringing healthcare recruitment to the digital age, I worked very closely with development (some of the lines of code in the product are mine) to create a mobile app that allowed nurses and doctors to look for available unfilled shifts in hospitals and medical centers, apply, sign contracts and get paid.

In true startup fashion, we had no fixed roles, so I tackled everything from user research leveraging the power of Intercom (which allowed us to target specific user categories) to growth hacking efforts where we conceived weekly tests and data analysis to gain insights into how to make the product better and improve business metrics. 

Some design and product development tools used:

• User journey maps
• Personas
• Card sorting
• Stakeholder co-creation workshops
• Close monitorization of user and customer feedback
• In-app and email surveys with Intercom/Typeform
• User needs and data-driven feature prioritization
• Product road mapping
• Figma design library for creating wireframes and mockups
• Notion for internal documentation and backlog management

As a design team member, I led the implementation of the TriOptima Design System, which included high-fidelity and wireframing Sketch libraries, a technology-agnostic CSS/JS framework, and detailed documentation that helped designers, developers, and other stakeholders to speak the same language. 

I was responsible for 37 releases, constantly communicating with seven different products and internal projects that used the technology-agnostic framework coupled with their Front-end architectures. 

I also worked closely with development teams, designing new features and workflows for products that have helped compress thousands of trillions of dollars in gross notional in the OTC financial market, where a critical bug could spell thousands of dollars in losses.

As a SPLIT Stockholm consultant embedded on the central UX team, I helped Ericsson improve their user experience standards by conducting frequent KPI evaluations and product reviews on its portfolio of 50+ software offerings. 

I was also a leading contributor to the Loki Design System. This CSS/JS tech stack agnostic framework enabled product teams to both prototype and create production-ready software, with a strong focus on ease of use and scalability.

Lastly, I was involved in a company-wide re-branding effort, from helping to design the new Hilda Sans typeface to creating the Ericsson UX Twodotzero strategy and several demo concepts to present the new brand vision (including a VR experience). These efforts set the design language foundation and user experience/interface design principles for the award-winning Ericsson Design System.

SPLIT Stockholm is a small but punch-packing digital agency with probably the most diversity of origins and talent in Sweden.

Though my time at SPLIT was spent primarily consulting at Ericsson, I was always part of the team activities and probably the most fun part, the after works!

As a member of an agile product development team, I was responsible for the overall user experience of Goo Create (now Amazon Sumerian), a browser-based WebGL games and interactive experiences creation tool. 

My responsibilities also included developing and optimizing our websites, keeping track of web analytics, and conducting frequent A/B testing.

Mana Gaming was created as an output of my passion for video games. What started with a simple blog ended up growing into a full fledged Wordpress website that featured daily journalistic articles, game reviews and even “Let’s Play” videos. 

At it’s peak the site had 3 collaborators and counted with the sponsorship of the publisher The Game Wall and media support from PlayStation and several local video games distributors.

As a founding team member at WannaPlayer (a Portuguese startup that wanted to be the Linked In of Football), I worked on everything from brand development, website design and User Experience (from user sign up to search optimization and user flows using several Personas that ranged from the non-tech Player to the tech savvy Scout).

I also did a lot with growth hacking, designed and wrote copy for marketing materials, created content and social media strategies. Even ended giving an helping hand with business plan and startup strategy, pitching and investment searching.

I was called for a fill-in position at this events/advertising agency and worked on campaigns for Vodafone, Yorn (youth oriented Vodafone brand) and Heineken and events like Vodafone Mexefest, Optimus Alive and the Heineken Road to the Final (UEFA Champions League).

Worked on everything from print ads, to outdoors, event and venue branding and merchandise, while working closely with media sellers, producers, manufacturers and also preparing “no sleep until it’s done” campaign pitches for clients.

Freelancing for several companies like Book House, Dinalivro, Mad Atoms (a Fox Digital site) and Eudora Portugal.

During my internship at this small advertising agency, I worked with clients like Nintendo, Pampero and Inimigo Público, while also enjoying non-profit experimental projects like the M28 magazine, for the Júlio de Matos Psychiatric Hospital.

The work done ranged from print ads, promotional merchandise, web and newsletter design/implementation, motion design for studio self-promotion and even video and audio editing for tv/web commercials (including voice actor direction and sound production management).

360º designer for women's magazine Shiu!

Worked on editorial design, photo editing, web design and interior design.

Editorial designer for Visão Viagens Magazine (fill-in position)

Tiago Almeida🇸🇪