Hello!
I’m a Human-centred Designer + Researcher, living in Melbourne, Australia.
I'm passionate about design aim to create and improve products and services that will impact the users’ lives in a meaningful and positive way.
In my most recent professional adventure, I worked at U1 Group (Australia’s longest-standing experience research and strategy consultancy) in a research and admin support role. There i was responsible for providing administrative and research support in all client projects, including project and client management (client and customer support, project expenses and invoices, scheduling, tracking and recording project progress).
I was also responsible for managing participant recruitment, assisting consultants with the reports and presentations (note taking, data analysis and contribution of text and visual elements) and managing/editing video recordings.
My design journey:
I come from a multicultural background and have always had an awareness and deep respect for the unique wants and needs of each individual. I love visual design and am obsessed with organization and problem solving and I'm constantly trying to make life more practical for me and everyone else. You know that person that emails random developers about annoying bugs? That's me.
My design journey started 10 years ago, in Brazil, when I first went to uni. Halfway through a Visual Design degree I wasn't happy with just designing logos and most of the briefs I worked with didn't involve research or reasoning behind my tasks. It was great to explore creativity and learn graphic tools but I felt like I couldn't defend my creations with nothing but my own taste and opinions. I needed more purpose for what I was doing, I didn't want to be an artist, I wanted to creatively solve problems. That's when I decided to attend Interior Design school. During this course, I interned at an architecture company as a service designer for 2 years. My responsibilities at this role included pretty much everything, from customer service, consulting, research, problem solving, sales, technical drawings and accompanying projects at construction sites. I was, however, a bit frustrated with the then interior design scene, and the repetitiveness of the work and the clients. That's when I decided to change courses in a more dramatic way and enrolled in a business school.
My business degree gave me the knowledge of how a business works (and how it should work), but the biggest takeaway I got from it was understanding people's behavior at the workplace. I learned a lot about proper work conduct and how to foster an environment that will encourage creativity, performance and fulfillment. I focused on HR and digital marketing and ended up working for digital agencies (analysis, content creation and, since I had the skills, development of graphic design pieces to be posted on social media).
However, I always wanted to live abroad and when I moved to Melbourne with my husband (december, 2016), I had to deal with the harsh reality of being a non-native English speaker. Although fluent in English, when working with social media, language gaps have a big impact, you need to understand the slangs and the culture very well, and Australia has a, let's say, particular set of slangs and private jokes that forced me to rethink my career options.
At first I flirted with web design a bit and stared to learn HTML and CSS but when I read about Human-Centred Design it felt like coming home. That's the design discipline I was searching for when I first went to uni (although I didn't know it at the time). The whole process, from research to ideation and testing and prototyping aligned perfectly with what I needed design to be, being able to be creative with a research and a set of user testing to back it up. Pretty much immediately I enrolled in a UX Design Immersive course, eager to learn the principles, the methods, the tools and dedicated myself completely to become a well-rounded multidisciplinary HC Designer.
If you're intrigued by my personal journey and want to know a bit more about it, give me a call or send me a message and we can schedule a cup of coffee.
For more information about my work, check out my projects and my LinkedIn profile.
