Ioana Kardos

Ioana Kardos

Product Designer @Stripe in London

About

I design award winning payment experiences at Vyne.
Over the last three years I've grown in my role from product designer to head of product design, where I've focused on making our product suite feel intuitive, polished and easy to use. I'm currently leading our product design team which includes our core payments experience for merchants (B2B) and consumers (B2B2C).

Previously I was a UX/UI Designer at 2dots, a design studio and have worked on B2C client projects for Grab & Wayboz and startups.

Projects

2023

I designed one of the most significant new products to Vyne, which aimed to expand and increase the revenue mix by 10x in the first year after launch.

2022

Our team designed an automated way to help the business reduce operational costs & unlock revenue faster. Currently 85% merchants sign up and use our payment services with minimal manual intervention.

Work Experience

2024 — Now
Product Designer at Stripe
London
2021 — 2024
Head of Product Design at Vyne
London, UK

I lead the design team for our core payment suite that includes web and mobile apps, website, internal tools and more. I report to executives and manage multiple large-scale projects. I took the product from 0 → 1 as the sole designer and put together a structure for the design team to grow.

Projects

🏁 Designed the onboarding experience to help the business unlock revenue faster. Currently 85% merchants use this product and we reduced the time to onboard from 42.8 days to 14.7 mins.
⬆️ Led the entire product design lifecycle including design sprint, roadmap, user flows, specs (co-led with PM), design language and sales prototypes.
🎨 Established a platform design system components and processes for multiple Java Script libraries that made design 2x faster.
👨‍👨‍👧‍👧 Managed a team of designers and shipped a website redesign, web app and marketing assets for merchants.

🎢 UX Design
Product Strategy • User flows • Rapid prototyping • Interactive flows • Heuristic evaluation • Survey • System evaluation • Design Systems

🔎 UX Research
Data analysis • Task analysis & personas • User interviews • Usability testing • A/B Testing • Multivariate testing • Cognitive walkthrough

🧩 Collaboration
Organise design sprints & workshops • Facilitating design crit • Collaborative problem solving • Cross-functional problem solving

📢 Soft skills
Detail oriented • Self starter • Communicative

💻 Tools Figma • Miro • FigJam • Notion • Looker • MixPanel • Jira • Shortcut • Adobe Illustrator

Development
HTML/CSS

2020 — 2021
UX Designer at 2dots
Manchester

Projects
Designed a property investment management mobile & web app to help small real-estate investors focus on the right metrics and increase their ROI.
Focus: Visual identity • Concept Development • Responsive web app design • Prototyping • Landing page • Brand guidelines • Design Systems

Worked with a cross-functional team of product designers and engineers to deliver a native mobile app that allows the community such as drivers and delivery partners to contribute to maps, collect POIs and other rich data like street imagery, street names and more for an additional income.
Focus: Interaction design • User interface • User experience • Responsive mobile app design • MVP

Education

2012 — 2014
MA in English Linguistics at University of Bucharest
Bucharest, RO
2013 — 2014
English Linguistics, ERASMUS Scholarship at Universita Ca' Foscari Venezia
Venezia
2010 — 2013
Bachelor's Degree, International Relations and European Studies at University of Bucharest
Bucharest, RO
2009 — 2012
Bachelor's degree, English Language and Literature at University of Bucharest
Bucharest, RO

Certifications

2022
Qualitative Research Series from Nielsen Norman Group

Cert ID 1059929

2021
Interface Design Course from Shift Nudge

• Visual skills of interface design
• Typography, Colours, Layout techniques
• Design Systems, Tactics, Interface Elements