![Alena Nikolaeva](https://res.cloudinary.com/read-cv/image/upload/c_fill,h_92,w_92/dpr_1.0/v1/1/profilePhotos/VUwzP72OcGf0qC7AKZXTt6FfJOV2/a422608b-2809-4527-9926-3c03b7e2bfc6.jpg?_a=DATAdtfiZAA0)
Alena Nikolaeva
Product Designer @GitHub Copilot in Valencia, Spain, She / her
Software Engineer and Product Designer with 7+ years of delivering online experiences. I'm focused on making the web, developer tools, and SaaS platforms accessible, inclusive, and meet WCAG standards.
As a member of the IAAP (International Association of Accessibility Professionals) community, I'm motivated to share ideas and knowledge about common accessibility patterns with teams and provide training. I also occasionally speak at conferences to further promote accessibility awareness.
Latest projects:
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GitHub Copilot is now available for invoiced GitHub Enterprise customers
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Announcing the GitHub Actions extension for VS Code GitHub Actions for VS Code
Learn more: bento.me/alenanik
Contact
Work Experience
Working on licenses, billing, enterprise, and admin experiences for GitHub Copilot: the world's most widely adopted AI developer tool.
In the fast-growing startup environment, I've worked on meeting business goals, technical constraints, and users' needs and combining them into beautiful developer experiences.
That included a design system for Xata, product design, brand, marketing, organizing internal design process, feature requests, and automation to collect and analyze customer feedback.
Typeform is a Spanish online software as a service
company that specializes in online form building and
online surveys.
My role included the following:
- Translating designs and business and accessibility requirements into useful, useable, clean, and tested UI code solutions that help users globally.
- Collaborate with design to perform QA, user interviews, and documentation, and fix incoming incidents on accessibility (AA).
- Participation in the team's (core product) workshops, ideations, discussions, and internal processes to help build the best possible solutions for the customers and meet their needs.
- A/B Testing, experiments implementation, and continuous iteration.
- Frontend development of the core product.
Front-end development for project such as Adcon 2020,
Navigate 2021 (digital platform EventDotSpace), re:Shape
2021, Amazon Business Exchange 2021 for Amazon, Melia,
ADQneobank, Year of Culture 2021.
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Amazon Business Exchange. A virtual event hosted by Amazon Business (project lead)
I participated in 3 projects for Amazon Business and build a reusable platform that was able to support 3 different online events, as project lead.
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Melia Hotels Design System at Melia (IC)
The project includes hundreds of reusable and tested components with the solid architecture of design tokens behind it. The challenge of the project was to collaborate with several designers, and adapt to project requirements to ensure the quality, accessibility, and visual aspects of the project.
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Years Of Culture (project lead)
Frontend development of the website and leading accessibility evaluations and compliance.
My role covered cross-functionally collaboration, creation of visual components, and implementation of layouts and features, transforming a design into React components, and isolating functionality to manage complexity and enable reusability.
A white-label software that creates a customer-centric rental experience along the entire value chain of the rental model. My role included software development of a core platform with a special focus on addressing early customer feedback.
Leading product design Roombox family (desktop, website, and VR experience app): developing a concept, documentation, marketing materials, design system, and brand identity for a product-rendering platform based on Next Limit’s Maxwell engine (ground-truth photorealistic renderer). Particularly:
- Work through the UX process (user experience research,
problem statement, user interviews, pain points,
customer journey mapping, storyboards, prototyping, and
design solution). - Design and develop a front-end of a web application with
React. - UI Design and Design System for Anyverse project anyverse.ai/
(physics-based synthetic data AI simulator for training
autonomous vehicles and perception-based robotics)
Worked on several projects within a marketing agency: including marketing materials, market research, branding, web and graphic design.
Speaking
WCAG continues to evolve, and since the first version was published in 1999, we have the latest update :partying_face:. Let's explore the updates in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), focusing on version 2.2, released on October 5, 2023. The additions and modifications aim to improve web accessibility, levels A, AA, when and how to apply them, and all the good stuff. By the end of this talk, I hope you have a deeper understanding of the updates in WCAG 2.2 and how they contribute to making the web more inclusive and accessible for everyone.
Documentation, resources and my drawings illustrating updates in the WCAG focusing on version 2.2, released on October 5, 2023. The additions and modifications, levels A, AA, when and how to apply them, and all the good stuff: <tinyurl.com/chuleta-de-ale…>
Slides: pitch.com/public/2fb4889…
Slides: noti.st/alenanikspeaks…
Cuando hablamos de productos y servicios en las startups, tenemos que asegurarnos de que los cimientos de nuestros productos nos ayudan a escalar y a crear un producto que funcione para todos los usuarios en los años posteriores. Creo que es una idea muy poderosa la de que no sabemos dónde acabará nuestro producto, como no sabemos quién va a pisar el puente que está construyendo una arquitecta.
Tech podcast with @miriamgonp y @dawntraoz where we spoke about CSS, accessibility and CSS animations with @gerig_thamara.
Talking about accessible CSS techniques and tricks.
Side Projects
I've teached young developers on how to understand, talk about, and implement accessibility during their Advanced Frontend Bootcamp 2023
I've worked with Kaleidos to help them with Taiga taiga.io/ free and open-source project management tool to make it more accessible and trained their design team.
It's my book and an educational project about accessibility, ethics, collaboration, security, design, and content: everything that comes with building an inclusive user-centered product that also solves business problems.
Writing
Personal projects, inspiration, and working daily routine with Cris
Tupu.io is a non-profit initiative to offer free mentorship to women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups in the tech industry. I shared my journey in tech in this interview.
Talent Hackers interviewed me alongside amazing women in technology.
Volunteering
Tupu.io is a non-profit initiative to offer free mentorship to women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups in the tech industry.
Education
Full scholarship granted
Preparation for accessibility certification exams offered by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals.
Women-in-Technology Scholarship granted
• Plan de Marketing Digital
• Branding Corporativo y Diseño Gráfico Digital.
• SEO y SEM. Google AdWords y Google Analytics