Alena Nikolaeva

Alena Nikolaeva

Senior Product Designer in Valencia, Spain, She / her

Senior Product Designer (better, designer-developer) with 7+ years of delivering online experiences.

My experience is best represented by my work at Next Limit (focused on Computer Graphics), Xata (a low-code Postgres database solution with branching) where I contributed to product design and brand, and GitHub Copilot, where I worked as an individual contributor on the AI team. I am eager to continue focusing my career on developer tools.

As a member of the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP), I am dedicated to sharing knowledge about common accessibility patterns with my team and providing training for companies.

Work Experience

2024 — Now
Senior Product Designer at Deel
Remote
2023 — 2024
Remote

GitHub is a developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage and share their code.

My role included product design of licenses and plans experiences for GitHub Copilot users, billing, dashboard and analytics, GitHub models, enterprise, and admin experiences for GitHub Copilot: the world's most widely adopted AI developer tool.

2022 — 2023
Remote

Developer-oriented SaaS database platform.

I've worked on meeting business goals within technical constraints, and users' needs and combining them into developer experiences.

My role included product design, design system for Xata, brand, marketing, organizing internal design process, feature requests, and automation to collect and analyze customer feedback.

2021 — 2022
Barcelona, Spain

Typeform is a Spanish online software as a service company that specializes in online form building and online surveys in low-code Saas environment.

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).
  • A/B Testing, experiments implementation, and continuous iteration.
  • Frontend development of the core product.
2019 — 2021
Remote

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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Years Of Culture (project lead)

    Frontend development of the website and leading accessibility evaluations and compliance.

2018 — 2020
Madrid, Spain

Leading product design Roombox family (desktop, website, and VR experience app), which included developing a concept, documentation, marketing materials, design system, and brand identity for a product-rendering platform based on Next Limit’s Maxwell engine physics-based synthetic data AI simulator for training autonomous vehicles and perception-based robotics.

  • Work through the UX process (user experience research, problem statement, user interviews, pain points, customer journey mapping, storyboards, prototyping, and design solutions for 3D architecture platform and data solution to generate all the high-quality datasets).
  • UI Design and Design System
  • Brand and websites (offering definition and design)
2013 — 2018
Spain

Worked on several projects within a marketing agency: including marketing materials, market research, branding, web and graphic design.

2015 — 2017
Web Designer at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Madrid, Spain

Projects

2024

AI-driven development plans concept:

  • Allows managers to create a set of actionable items to improve retention and career development based on employee's performance

  • Allows to generate development plans for different themes and assist in the writing with AI

  • I worked on UX concepts of AI, Manager and workers POV responsive designs, implementation assistance and QA.

  • Analytics and metrics components (allowing to visualize and export data at any moment)

2024

Audience: GitHub Copilot users interested in expanding their experience with GitHub models.

Models can be acquired through the Marketplace github.com/marketplace/mo… (I worked on unifying Marketplace pages and defining the connection to the Models playground and future billing experiences)

2023

Audience: Enterprise, organizations who are using GitHub Copilot (a code completion and automatic programming tool developed by GitHub and OpenAI).

I worked on admin experiences for all Copilot plans (including notifications and new Copilot Enterprise Mixed Licensing experiences that grants GitHub Enterprise Cloud customers greater flexibility in selecting the best Copilot plans for their needs. It is now possible to set a Copilot plan at the organization level instead of at the enterprise level, allowing granularity of the choice).

2022

Audience: GitHub's user base is uniquely composed of software developers, engineers, and tech enthusiasts.

GitHub Actions is a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that allows developers to automate your build, test, and deployment pipeline. I worked on VS Code extension as my first project at GitHub that allows developers to have the same workflow as on the browser, but without leaving their code editors.

2022

Audience: Developers

Serverless Postgress Database solution allows to create database in no to low-code environment.

  • Product launch (branding, swag, marketing materials, public website)

  • Product design of the platform: CSV import, migration requests, integrations, calendar picker, collecting user input with custom-designed form, supporting dark and light mode tokens for the application, meeting accessibility AA requirements.

  • The features supported at the product that I worked on: xata.io/docs/overview

2021

Audience: No-code SaaS platform for small-to-medium businesses, enterprise customers and startups (mostly, marketing professionals).

As a Software Engineer at the moment, I worked on Design System, features deliveries (cookie banner, animations, A/B experiments) and accessibility improvements.

2020
Agency projects at Hanzo

My first experience in an agency, the audience was diverse (from local brands to bigger clients, such as Amazon).

My role (frontend developer) in several projects included developing and maintaining large code bases (frontend architecture), providing accessibility workshops to the team, and executing as technical front lead on several projects.

2019

Audience: technical proficiency.

Industries: Automotive in-cabin monitoring, autonomous vehicles, security & surveillance detection systems

Anyverse is a platform (desktop) that allows to generate high-quality synthetic data (physics-based).

My role as the designer included:

  • Redesigning the offering (website, marketing and other materials)

  • Technical writing

  • Creating assets (3D renders and editing)

  • Working on design system to align website with the desktop application.

2018

Audience: technical (specialized in 3D rendering)

Lead designer for RoomBox project included:

  • Desktop app (C++) and browser (Unity) app

  • Mobile, tablet versions

  • It's possible to decorate 3D house with real furniture and collaborate

I led the design process from the project's definition through to its launch, including investigation of similar products in the market, research, UX definition, and weekly team iterations to transition from a C++ application to a Unity-browser-based solution. I had a 100% ownership over the design.

At the end, I contributed to growing the project's audience by redesigning the product offering, re-designing the website, and developing social media guidelines.

Bento
Bluesky
LinkedIn
Obsidian
GitHub
Twitter

Speaking

2024
Bilbao, Spain

WCAG continues to evolve, and since the first version was published in 1999. My talk covers 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.

Extra materials

2023
Proven ways to make your website accessible in 2023 at JS Heroes
Cluj-Napoca, Romania
2023
Madrid, Spain

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.

2022
Online

Tech podcast with @miriamgonp y @dawntraoz where we spoke about CSS, accessibility and CSS animations with @gerig_thamara.

2022
Online

Talking accessibility and personal career growth

2021
Online

Talking about accessible CSS techniques and tricks.

Side Projects

2023

I've teached young developers on how to understand, talk about, and implement accessibility during their Advanced Frontend Bootcamp 2023

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.

2023
"You, Me, Accessibility" book

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

2023

Personal projects, inspiration, and working daily routine with Cris

2022

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.

2022

Talent Hackers interviewed me alongside amazing women in technology.

Volunteering

2019 — Now

Tupu.io is a non-profit initiative to offer free mentorship to women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups in the tech industry.

2019 — 2020
Volunteer at Mozilla Support (for Support Forum) at Mozilla

Education

2019 — Now
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science and Engineering at VIU - Universidad Internacional de Valencia
Valencia, Spain

Full scholarship granted

2021 — 2022
IAAP CPACC Certification Preparation at Deque University

Preparation for accessibility certification exams offered by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals.

2020 — 2020
Product Manager Nanodegree Program at Udacity
Remote
2018 — 2018
Full-Stack Web Development Bootcamp (MERN Stack) at Wild Code School
Madrid, Spain

Women-in-Technology Scholarship granted

2017 — 2018
Master Degree in Communication and Social Media at Inesdi Digital Business School

• Plan de Marketing Digital
• Branding Corporativo y Diseño Gráfico Digital.
• SEO y SEM. Google AdWords y Google Analytics