About
Olá. I’m Cristina Tulcidas, Product / UX Designer, crafting experiences that help people.
I’ve spent my years as a professional, designing end-to-end solutions at agencies, international technology companies and startups.
I love researching and understanding the cognitive psychology behind human emotions 🫀, in order to craft simple solutions that translate complex ideas and humanise the intersection between people and technology.
👩🏻💻 My methodology is adaptive and cross-collaborative. I believe great products are built upon the fluidity between design, research and engineering.
Outside of work, I talk about the importance of design and cross-collaboration in tech-teams. And when I am not lost auto-layouting every frame on my project files, you can find me strength-training, running or playing paddle tennis 🎾.
Let’s get in touch 💌. I am available for new opportunities, or just for a coffee over discussions related to the UX design realm. I’d love to connect with like-minded professionals who want to change the world.
Speaking
Navigating challenges and fostering successful cross-collaboration within tech-teams.
Instead of isolating the process, consider that both devs and designers are designing and building something.
Work Experience
As the founding designer at Local.Foundation, my responsibilities include leading the brand direction of the visual identity and designing the products MVP end-to-end solution; identifying through UxR opportunities for growth and engagement; working alongside the co-founding stakeholders to define product strategy, business goals and user needs; and delving into UX copyrighting. Our mission is to empower people and build communities based on the fundamental values of safety, diversity, equality, inclusivity, accessibility and ethics, allowing no space for dark patterns designs.
Responsible for designing end-to-end solutions; identifying opportunities for improvements and new features; work alongside stakeholders and team leaders from CX and marketing as well as engineering on defining OKR’s and roadmaps; facilitate QA; create and maintain design system components; collaborate closely with engineering to understand technical limitations & constraints; manage priorities and incoming design ticket requests from the team. While initially my main focus was on the Web App and iOS Native App, incrementally over time, I was working across all different environments including Android, cross-functionally between the B2C (flat.io) and B2B (flat.edu) products, and within light and dark modes.
Leading the design, working closely together with the engineering team and management within an Agile environment with bi-weekly sprints for serviced projects and KANBAN for the internal product. My responsibilities included mapping out the structure of the product; design the end-to-end solutions while participating in the definition of the architectural structure alongside the engineers focusing on the user-flow and user-experience; perform QA reviews and iterative support. In all projects developed, there was an underlying focus on mental health awareness.
Closely collaborated with engineers, POs, clients and stakeholder within an Agile bi-weekly sprints environment; focusing on building functional and technically stable management system solutions. Also took on a more multi-disciplinary role to help improve the companies social media platforms, website and article’s branding visuals. As a company with a high value for a people company culture and career growth, I was provided with the opportunity to successfully lead and manage a team of 2 junior developers in building an MVP for a smaller serviced project, in order to acquire skills and grow into a leadership position.
Mainly assigned to web design based and digital projects; also performing basic front-end development of landing pages or emails; creating information architecture to design way-finding systems; and supporting the rest of the team in any graphic design and branding projects as needed.
Incorporated a multidisciplinary role within digital platforms, working on developing brand visuals for digital spaces and designing and developing basic HTML & CSS landing pages.
As an intern at Opera, my work experience was divided into two phases. The first working closely in the IT Department, where my main focus was to improve my skills on basic FE markup languages (HTML, CSS and JavaScript); by designing and then implementing the FE for the new Opera Intranet system and the “quick and automatic” Opera Badge system for visitors. The second phase of my apprentice was under the Marketing Department where I was given various tasks, from creating speed dials; brochures, assisting on the new Opera Brand Identity and building campaigns for Opera Mini and new browser features.
The focus as a trainee were to learn the very basics of FE markup languages (HTML, CSS, jQuery, JavaScript, XML and PHP) and Wordpress as a CMS. After the initial learning phase, I worked closely with the team in setting up Wordpress accounts inside the main server, performed small FE changes, designed banners and mockups for client serviced projects and as part of my curricular evaluation, I built my very first portfolio using all the techniques learned.