About

I have spent over ten years helping businesses designing and strategizing B2C digital products. I’m a pragmatic decision-maker passionate about leading design teams to solve complex challenges through user-centred design. Besides work, I also enjoy playing video games, dancing, and simply having a good time with friends.

Thoughts from my partners in crime

Asher Saeed

CPTO @ Whizz.com.au

Juan is a talented and seasoned design leader. His approach to design problems is practical while also being innovative. He is also great at managing stakeholder expectations and takes on feedback in a highly collaborative manner. A great guy to have in any product/design team!

Daniel Ramirez

UI Designer @ Sniip

I had the pleasure (and luck) of working with Juan for over 3 years in the UX/UI field. Juan was also a great mentor to me, someone you can totally rely on when it comes to taking important UX/UI decisions. He really goes beyond regular ideas and can easily think out of the box in order to create products that really bridge the gap between users and business needs.

Dr. Jonathan King

Founder @ Lysn Health

Working with UX Design Team was a pleasure. Juan helped us take our MVP design and transform take our insights and ideas to create a beautiful and easy to use game-changing mental health product and service. Definitely will work again with him when we expand our product portfolio.

Philippe Lasserre

Head of UX @ Foxtel

Juan has done a great job as the lead UXer in the redesign of Foxtel Go across multiple releases and devices, as well as working on research and UIs for various other products. Juan is a very talented UX practitioner and UI designer, who can be relied upon for great visual design work too. He is a team player, capable of representing his views clearly, but also able to lose an argument gracefully and move on without any fuss. He is a good communicator and is at ease managing challenging stakeholder workshops and presentations.

Vincent Wijangco

Sr. Business Analyst @ Foxtel

Juan understands and practices Design Thinking principals, where he ensures and is always demonstrating great understanding and balance of both the business requirements and customer needs, which reflect in his designs. An impressive attribute to Juan’s work and designs is his understanding of the importance of User Experience led designs. He is very diligent in the detail and the end result of his designs truly reflect the end user experience needs.

Nolan Chenn

Sr. Product Manager @ Foxtel

I have the pleasure of working with Juan on a number of customer-facing products with challenging stakeholders and timeline. He has demonstrated he always strives for the best design to provide the best customer experience and deliver a powerful customer engaging product. He was also able to adapt and think outside of the box to find the optimal design to meet the customer needs with constraints and a tight timeline. His creative mind is second to none that I have worked with. He is also a great team player and easy to work with.

My Skills

Design Management

Leading design is my passion. I mentor designers, build teams and processes that help businesses to embrace a customer-centric approach. My most recent experience at Gumtree, CarsGuide, and Autotrader taught me to work with multiple design teams across different organisations. Collaboration is a challenge, but I believe in building trusting relationships that enable us to co-create and make things happen. I also encourage a growth mindset within my teams to continue developing our design skills and evolving as human beings.

Design Thinking

I help companies to solve complex problems by facilitating the “Design Thinking” process. I encourage creativity and collaboration between cross-functional teams, by co-creating ideas using problem-solving techniques such as empathy mapping, customer journeys, personas development, affinity diagrams, features prioritization grid, and others.

I believe that cultivating design thinking throughout an organization is the key to innovation.

Critical Thinking

I strive to improve the quality of my thinking by constantly analyzing, assessing and reconstructing my own ideas. I use critical thinking and deductive reasoning to help me discern complex problems and decisions in business and in my personal life. I like to start by using the “5 Whys” tool, to uncover the real issue. Then, I gather and analyze relevant information about it, to help me comprehend it better. Ultimately I generate hypothesis or conclusions, and possible solutions.

User Research

Over the years I have gained valuable experience doing quantitative and qualitative research studies. I ran usability testing for Foxtel Go and IQ3 (Setop-box). I created a competitor analysis for Foxtel Go kids. I performed user interviews for Foxtel, Lysn, JustAuto. I analyzed research studies and usage data for Foxtel. I oversaw Foxtel Go Kids research studies performed by vendors, capture insights by observing user behaviours while in testing and focus groups. I analyzed Hotjar heatmaps, usage recordings, and customer reviews for JustAuto.

UI Design

I started designing thousands of icons for software and web applications back in 2007. Later, I transitioned into web design and UI design for web-based products. From this experience, I learned to solve complex UI challenges. Nowadays, I enjoy creating design systems and concept designs to improve my skills. I ideate by sketching, wireframing layouts, and creating high fidelity designs in Figma. I encourage teams to create scalable and consistent design systems using the atomic design approach. I’m constantly looking for new ways to create more efficient and sustainable design systems.

Prototyping

The times of Sketch, Invision, and Axure are gone… Today, I use Figma for prototyping, which allows me to demonstrate user flows and testing. For demonstrating micro-interactions I use “Principle”. However, I usually try to keep it simple, I believe that creating high fidelity prototypes is a waste of time, unless the product has already the basics covered. I learned that in the fast-paced business environment, it’s more important to test quick, learn and iterate. In my free time, I enjoy learning about new ways and tools that enable teams to take the design one step further.