Swathi Ravichandran

Swathi Ravichandran

Design Leader in Seattle, WA, she/her

Work Experience

2020 — Now
Seattle, WA
  • As a founding designer (8th employee), I was responsible for defining and leading the product and design strategy for Yesler. Collaborated closely with founders and delivered the same.
  • Led and delivered designs for various products (and features) including:
    Handshake - A messaging platform for Lumber buyers, sellers, brokers,
    Storefront - Seller profile with ability to manage their Lumber inventory,
    Groundwork & Intel - Analytics platform showcasing intel on purchase history, metrics around cost & time savings) and more.
  • Conceived and proposed Storefront - a product line that helped increase adoption (5x) and generated new revenue streams.
  • Champion for both internal and external users and influenced culture and core values for the organization in liaison with executives.
2019 — 2020
Seattle, WA
  • Performed Heuristic evaluation for existing websites - Financial Protection Forum & Global Risk Financing (GRiF) projects
  • Conceptualized and provided design recommendations for key applications - Disaster Risk Financing & Insurance Program (DRFIP)
2018 — 2019
Chennai, India / Chicago, IL
  • As an Early member of the design team, owned the hiring (campus and lateral) process viz., funnel building, candidate experience & employee onboarding. Grew the team from 1 to 10 people in span of 8 months and mentored them along the way.
  • Led and delivered UX redesign of flagship products; conceptualized customer experience for newer products with focus on improving Tracking visibility & Operational metrics across Warehouses / Distribution centers. Increased downloads (by 3x) and DAU (by 2.5x) significantly after the launch of redesign. Improved UX CSAT score from 3.1 to 3.9.
  • Delivered FourKites Design System v1.0 and v2.0 to ensure consistent user experience across our product suite.
  • Created a culture of customer obsession by strong participation in User Conferences, Customer Advisory Board (CAB) sessions, Customer calls, On-site field visits.
  • In the spirit of championing a more open & transparent organisation culture, created Demo Day - a forum for teams to share their work and learnings. This helped create visibility across teams and cross-pollinate learnings.
2016 — 2018
Chennai, India
  • Championed user experience of 22 applications across Web, Desktop, Mobile, Hololens and Tango platform for various products including - Connect, Storefront, ATLAS, eCognition, Facility Management.
  • Worked closely with Head of Design to deliver Design Strategy document and direction for design team.
  • Created & participated in internal forums to ensure customer stories are surfaced and represented adequately.
  • Mentored a 5 member team to help identify their career goals and procured training budget to aid their professional growth.
2015 — 2016
Chennai, India
  • Collaborated with internal developers to build designs for Data pipeline platform, Self-serve API portal, OSS platform, Chrome plugins, slackbots to increase overall productivity, reduce engineering cost and facilitate developer operations at scale
  • Ideated and built creatives for onboarding and product demo videos for a set of internal facing (engineering) tools. Reduced engineering time spent on "how-to queries" by 50%.
  • Helped with design collaterals for company-wide initiatives and events - like, marketing, hiring & brand building.
2013 — 2015
Johannesburg, South Africa
  • Managed and led a variety of user experience design projects for the Innovation team at Standard Bank - ATM redesign, financial planner tool and communication design for key messaging to bank's customers
  • Understanding users’ ecosystems through data gathering techniques — observation, stakeholder interviews, focus group discussions & contextual inquiry, persona stories and detailed mood boards.
  • Devised in-lab and remote based UX Validation and Usability Tests.
  • Conducted performance and persuasion based UX reviews.
2012 — 2013
Chennai, India
  • Worked for a myriad of clients to enhance their products' User Experience and helped in optimising specific client metrics like operational cost, conversion, reduced effort, etc.
  • Delivered pre-sales engagement collaterals and worked on POCs to win customers
  • Won 2.2M worth of customer deals.

Volunteering

2005 — Now
Chennai & Thirupoonthuruthi, Tamil Nadu
  • One of the early and active members of the Trust founded by my grandfather Thirupoonthuruthy Late Sri V Venkatesan.
  • The organization aims to create visibility for the compositions of Saint Sri Narayana Tirtha (an Indian Composer).
  • Led initiatives such as "Tarangam Music School" for underprivileged kids, "Tarangam Annual Music Competitions" to ensure talents learn compositions of Narayana Tirtha at a younger age.
  • During pandemic (Jun 2020), I led "TarangamSeries", an initiative where prominent young artistes representing South Indian Classical Music performed one rare composition of Saint Sri Narayana Tirtha per episode. The series documented over 50 Tarangams - this helped leverage the power of digital mediums to connect with musicians, rasikas, organisers to create a better reach for the composer and his beautiful compositions.
2022 — 2023
Worldwide

Working with CARESpaces (Indian performing arts safe-space) to provide support to peers by dedicating time, providing resources and actionable solutions towards addressing sexual and identity-oriented misconduct.

2019 — 2021
Worldwide

Between Dec 2019 and Feb 2021, mentored and coached 70+ individuals on all things related to design - higher education, hiring, product consulting, salary negotiations especially for women designers, design-engineering collaboration, UX writing.

Education

2010 — 2012
Pune, India

Active Member of: Student Academic Forum, Student Book Bank, SIMChords (Music Club), SIMCognition (Knowledge portal), SIMConnect (Online Branding and Marketing Cell), SIMClairvoyance (Guest Lecture Series), SIMCinema (Film Club), SIMCapture (Photography Club)

2007 — 2010
Chennai, India

Active member: Abhilasha, Jhankar, Montage Club, Quiz club, Literary Club, Music Club

Contact

Twitter