Hello, I’m Nicole!
I’m a Chicago-based product designer who loves the messy, human side of design.
I've spent my UX career designing for complex, warehousing workflows but I bring a multidisciplinary background spanning marketing, brand design, and customer-facing operations, giving me a rare ability to move fluidly across domains, communicate with diverse stakeholders, and deliver work that holds up from concept through execution.
Case Studies
Redesigning an Add To Inventory Process
I redesigned our “Add to Inventory” tool that resulted in $50k cost savings within a few months of launch.
Enabling multi-item packing with a Put Wall System
I designed the interface and user experience of a Put Wall System to help enable multiple products to be packed and fulfilled in the same package. The result? An estimated $2.6M in cost savings in 2024.
I’m a Chicago-based product designer who brings systems and design thinking together to solve complex solutions.
My path to UX design began in e-commerce at Zalora Philippines, where I discovered my fascination with the psychology behind user behavior, how my design choices for site banners and ads drove engagement and conversion.
This curiosity led me through roles in copywriting, social media strategy, and content development at companies in Hong Kong and the US, each deepening my understanding of how to communicate effectively with users. This cross-functional background means I don't just design interfaces. I ask questions, seek cultural and business context, and obsess about the ‘WHY’and the ‘FOR WHAT’ of my designs.
Beyond my profession, I’m a life-long learner who enjoys the transformations behind cooking and baking, pushing myself through CrossFit workouts and training my challenging rescue dog, Taboo.
Craft & Practice
❋ Design and Prototyping
Figma, Figma Make, Claude Code, Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign)
❋ Research and Strategy
User interviews, contextual inquiry, usability testing, journey mapping, heuristic evaluation
❋ Operational & Systems Thinking
Workflow design, internal tooling UX, warehouse & fulfillment systems, cross-functional requirements gathering
❋ AI-Assisted Design
Daily use of Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Figma Make for research synthesis, concept exploration, and structured critique; persona-based prompting for pressure-testing design decisions
❋ Collaboration & Delivery
Agile/Scrum, JIRA, Confluence, stakeholder facilitation, Next.js App Router (familiarity)
❋ Language Proficiencies
HTML, CSS, and SQL….
… as well as: English, Tagalog and Portuguese.
Career Overview
Senior Graphic Designer
ca. 2013-2015
Senior Graphic Designer At Zalora, one of the first and largest e-commerce platforms in the Philippines, I translated brand guidelines into cohesive collateral across print, digital, and retail touchpoints. The work required consistency at scale, producing omnichannel assets that held up across a fast-moving, high-volume catalog.
Marketing Manager
ca. 2015-2021
I led the creative side of product launches end to end: concepting campaigns, directing photoshoots, organizing community events, and producing organic content that built brand awareness without a paid media budget. Writing, visual storytelling, and community-building all lived under one role.
Fresh from the harrowing shut-downs of the COVID-19 pandemic, I decided to embark on an intensive six-month program focused on design thinking, Figma, and UX best practices, making a deliberate pivot from marketing and graphic design into product. It was a foundation-building period that formalized the research instincts and systems thinking I had already been developing in practice.
UX Design Bootcamp
ca. 2021
At Ruggable, I worked closely with product and engineering to figure out not just what to build, but what was actually worth building. A lot of the role was qualitative research and systems thinking, designing internal tools where the stakes were high and the margin for confusion was low.
Senior Product Designer
ca. 2022-2026
