My experience is better described by my work at [Typeform](https://www.typeform.com/) (related to UX, accessibility, and improving metrics), [Hanzo studio](https://hanzo.es/) (animations, design systems, and leading creative projects for clients such as Amazon), [Xata](https://xata.io/) (where I've been leading design team) and [GitHub](https://github.com/) when I joined AI team as an individual contributor (billing, policies, licensing, enterprise and admin experiences).

I have extensive experience in cross-functional collaboration with various teams, where I create and design visual components, implement layouts and features, and ensure a seamless visual perspective. If the project requires it, I could be spending time on transforming designs into scalable sets of accessible components with CSS, JavaScript, React, Vue, or Nuxt to isolate functionality, manage complexity, and enable reusability.

What I love doing the most:

* Providing accessibility training for teams and speaking about tools, testing, and different approaches to building products that are useful, inclusive, and available for all, regardless of users' ability, technology, or the situation they are experiencing.
* Raising awareness and introducing testing, evaluation, users with diverse abilities interviews, and reporting.
* Ensuring that the WCAG standards are met in the product, alerts system implementation, tracking, and e2e accessibility testing.
* Prepare scripts, and conduct user interviews.
* Ensuring strong partnership with research and Growth teams.
* Passion for functional programming, reusable, modular UI code, and scalable design systems.
* End-to-end design system solutions: from design to implementation with unit testing.
* Do light QA or plan heavily for e2e testing strategies with the engineering team.
* Thinking about both frontend and backend architecture to help quick integration of UI elements to the application.
* Make use of my experience of componentization, CSS, and modular systems based on component (styling and behavior) libraries when improving a product's UI.

In my free time, I travel, write, work on my illustrations, discover coffee places, and spend time with loved ones.

ES: Para las formaciones de accesibilidad en las empresas, escríbeme por correo o LinkedIn.

About

A significant aspect of my work as a designer and professional in the tech field is ensuring that technology meets the basic needs of all users, regardless of their background, level of education, or the technology they use.

My focus is on ensuring that all users can have similar experiences, such as finding a button, interacting with the interface, closing a modal, or adding items to a cart. These seemingly small interactions can either bring delight or frustration, especially in areas concerning basic user needs like healthcare, online payments, or AI. My contribution lies in helping developers make accessible choices to ensure basic user needs in technology.

My goal has always been to make users feel valued, important, and ultimately, happy. I believe that the result of my work should be a product that caters to all users and enhances people’s lives.

The accessibility work that I've been immersed in for the past five years requires extensive conversations and collaboration. It also entails being accountable for the final products, ensuring that they are not only optimized, tested, and aesthetically pleasing but also usable by all individuals. This commitment to transparency, proactivity, and integrating design into people's lives resonates deeply with me on a personal level.

I approach my work with a "users-first" mentality, striving to create products that not only comply with standards (such as WCAG, Directive (EU) 2016/2102, among others) but also empower users to accomplish tasks in the manner that brings them the most delight.

I aspire to excel at work by embracing its core values, as well as by focusing on the following:

* Transparency and partnership: I understand the importance of empathy and communication within a team, especially in addressing the challenges of remote work. I often over-communicate and share ideas early, even the bad ones. I’m used to time zones and happy to adjust my schedule to maximise time with teammates when necessary. Though I must admit, I never miss my art classes.

* No-ego: I begin my design process with questions for the team, not by providing the answers. It’s never about personal contribution or being protective of my own ideas, but about learning together.

* Reliability and trust: Seek clarity on priorities and engage in open discussions is important. I don't hesitate to raise a hand when timelines can't be met and find compromises.

* Design community: coming from a software engineering background, I acknowledge that some parts of design process might not be my strongest suit. Therefore, I actively seek assistance, feedback, and nitpicking from my peers. I’ve chosen to study in Barcelona’s School or Arts and Design and get my master degree that covers user experience, research, typography, web and app UI, design systems, everything that is deep enough to fill my gaps in design files, but I’m still struggling with choosing which button looks better.

* I learn constantly! About everything: accessibility, illustration, people... More about people than anything.

Working with me

Senior Product Designer @deel

Interview with Alena Nikolaeva, product designer at GitHub

Personal projects, inspiration, and working daily routine with Cris

Accessibility articles

Written interview

Talent Hackers interviewed me alongside amazing women in technology.

"Should you get in tech? And how to choose your niche?" - my journey in tech series

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.

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

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

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

Accessibility instructor

I've worked with Kaleidos to help them with Taiga https://taiga.io/ free and open-source project management tool to make it more accessible and trained their design team.

Accessibility consultant

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.

"You, Me, Accessibility" book

Talking accessibility and personal career growth

Web Reactiva Episode (ES)

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: <https://tinyurl.com/chuleta-de-alena>

What’s new in accessibility? WCAG 2.2 at glance."

Slides: https://noti.st/alenanikspeaks/lKIxUp

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.

Accessibility in startups

Accessibility episode with @bolonio

Slides: https://pitch.com/public/2fb4889f-fc22-493e-9a31-9953c2f932b3

Proven ways to make your website accessible in 2023

Talking about accessible CSS techniques and tricks.

Lightning talk on CSS and accessibility

Accessibility in design systems

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

No me da la vida Episode on CSS and animations

Mozilla

Volunteer at Mozilla Support (for Support Forum)

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

Mentorship for women in technology

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.

Software Engineer

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 https://anyverse.ai/
  (physics-based synthetic data AI simulator for training
  autonomous vehicles and perception-based robotics)

Product Designer

Senior Product Designer

Social media manager and brand

Working on licenses, billing, enterprise, and admin experiences for GitHub Copilot: the world's most widely adopted AI developer tool.

Web Designer

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.

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

Marketing, brand, research, and graphic designer

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.

Alena Nikolaeva

2024