Cristina Tulcidas

Cristina Tulcidas

Product / UX Designer in Portugal, She/Her

About

Olá, I’m Cristina, a generalist UX and Product Designer who seeks to blend insights, cognitive psychology and emotional behaviours to unlock experiences that humanise the intersection of people and technology.

Designer by qualification and kind human by choice, what ties it together is a love for learning, and passion for understanding people and their stories. My methodology is adaptive and cross-collaborative, I believe great products are built upon the fluidity between design, research and engineering, and on occasion, I very much enjoy the invitations to speak about it to the community.

I’ve been doing this design thing for 10 years, and have dedicated my focus to UX and Product Design in the past +6 years. Passionate about helping, teaching, guiding and rising others to their full potential, there’s this quote from Simon Sinek that deeply resonates with how I intend to one spark people as an aspiring design manager, which quotes: “Leadership is not a journey to rise in the ranks. Leadership is a journey to help those around us rise”.

When I am not lost in design jargon, I am a drooling mother of a 50kg italian mastiff, wannabe hybrid athlete in the making (basically a sports addict) and a festival princess.

Let’s get in touch 💌

Speaking

2024
Faro

Navigating challenges and fostering successful cross-collaboration within tech-teams.

2019
Faro

How pixels and art meet UX.

2018
Faro

Instead of isolating the process, consider that both devs and designers are designing and building something.

Work Experience

2024 — Now
Remote — Portugal, NZ

Local.Foundation (SaaS B2C platform) tackles the growing problem of loneliness in the community building industry, by activating people with the right tools and mindsets to foster strong and vibrant communities.

Responsibilities:

  • Researching and collaborating on PoC, and defining product vision

  • Re-thinking design UX patterns, language and principles to improve privacy, ethics & consumer transparency experiences with good usability and best practices

2021 — 2024
Remote — Portugal, France

Flat.io is a digital music notation composition platform for music lovers (SaaS B2C), and Flat.io/edu is a dedicated music education platform for teachers and students (SaaS B2B).

Achievements:

  • Conducted growth experiments and designed an interactive tutorial for the onboarding experience on the basics of music notation composition inputs, generating +20% user-retention for first-time users session duration

  • Initiated dedicated redesign proposals for out-dated features such as the user profile and mobile apps login authentication onboarding flows, with a focus of improving design language and principles with industry usability best practices

    Responsibilities:

  • End-to-end design and ideation of UX improvements and new features cross-platform for +5M music lovers
    Launched the Android app from 0 to 1 with the lead android engineer

  • Incorporated dark mode into both iOS and Android design systems

  • Helped maintain, improve and create design system components shared with the entire design and development teams

  • Created a new designated Notion space for the design team, improving the views for stakeholders, by including databases for each designer’s profile and responsibilities, meeting notes and design review templates, trimester objectives and business goals, monthly planning and roadmap calendar, and a design ticket requests board to better manage priorities and measure the need of the requests

2019 — 2021
Remote — Portugal, Germany

AI Coaching GmbH services AI solutions focused on tackling mental health.

Achievements:

  • Helped innovate the search of digital certifications offered by the 74 chambers of Industry and Commerce (IHKs) with a SaaS B2C platform and a B2B back-office system to help manage all the certified offers

  • Designed a SaaS B2C ML digital health coach-bot, developed to help sales professionals tackle mental health struggles and professional growth

Responsibilities:

  • Led the design efforts for all PoC, MVP projects and end-to-end solutions, from desk and user research, ideation, concept development, usability testing, wire-framing, prototyping, and QA

  • Associate PM, building the management processes under an Agile Scrum methodology and Kanban which improved the teams communication and created clear roadmap visions for all projects and service proposals

  • Contributed to the concept development of structured and logical architecture ML systems in close collaboration with the engineering team

  • Built design systems from 0 to 1 and performed QA reviews together with engineering

2017 — 2019
Portugal

SaaS Engineering service projects web applications.

Achievements:

  • Associate PM and lead designer of an accelerating education-based database MVP solution, enabling shared trainings for professional educators

  • Designed a CMS, stock and invoicing back-office collateral for +350k users — Pitstop Wawi

Responsibilities:

  • Played a significant role in the rebrand of Evodeck’s visual identity, to help improve the companies social media marketing strategy and branding purpose, and full redesign of the companies website

  • Closely collaborated with engineers, PO’s, clients and stakeholders within an Agile Scrum and Kanban environment to ensure QA between design and engineering

2016 — 2018
Generalist Designers at Algarvexcite Lda.
Portugal

Water Sports activities and Luxury Boat Charters.

Achievements:

  • Built the companies service websites using a CMS and Front-end development capabilities (HTML CSS, JavaScript) that grew to +1k users in the first month, actively purchasing services through the websites forms, and growing the business’s profitability in over €500M through the season

Responsibilities:

  • Full design and development of individual websites for the companies service selection (boat charters and water sports activities)

  • Encompassed a generalist role, from website design to front-end implementation, traffic analysis with Google Analytics, SEO strategy and implementation, social media management and posting, and video editing

2016 — 2016
Portugal

Branding agency focused on luxury services.

Achievements:

  • Wayfinding system for Quinta do Lago’s infrastructures (one of Europe’s most prestigious luxury resorts and residential developments, generating significant economic impact of several hundred million euros)

  • Design of Ombria Resort web page and graphical elements. Ombria Resort is a sumptuous and secluded resort that will feature the first Viceroy Hotel in Europe.

Responsibilities:

  • Designed web pages and digital projects

  • Front-end development of landing pages and email signatures and newsletters using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

  • Created information architecture of way-finding systems

2015 — 2016
Portugal

Based in the second largest city in the Algarve, Critérios Criativos was a 360º service design agency.

Responsibilities:

  • Generalist approach design within digital platform services

  • Designed brand visuals for digital spaces

  • Developed the front-end of landing pages for hotel business’s (HTML, CSS, JavaScript)

  • Created interaction and user-experience solutions for client services

2015 — 2015
Norway

Opera Software is a Norwegian company known for developing the Opera web browser, which boasts +350M active users worldwide and is renowned for its innovative features, speed, and data-saving capabilities.

Achievements:

  • Launched the Opera Mini new browser features campaign

  • Designed the new Opera Rebrand booklet

Responsibilities:

  • Designed user-experiences and interfaces in collaboration with the internal IT and Design & Marketing departments

  • Improved my skills in front-end markup languages (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) when designing and developing the new Opera Intranet management system and automatic Opera Badge system for visitors within the Internal IT department

  • Worked closely together and autonomously with the Marketing department on designing speed dial icons and brochures, building campaigns for Opera Mini and browser features, and assisting on the new Opera Rebrand

2014 — 2014
Norway

An all-girl digital studio in Oslo’s alternative and vibrant neighbourhood Grünerløkka.

Responsibilities:

  • Learned the very basics of front-end development markup languages (HTML, CSS, jQuery, JavaScript, XML and PHP)

  • Helped setup client service websites using WordPress as an internal CMS in the main server

  • Performed small front-end iterations within client serviced projects

  • Designed banners and concept mock-ups to use in client webpages

2018
Team Leadership & Management from Terra da Perfeição

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