Digital Product Designer
MAX RAMOS
I'd like to thank you for taking the time to review my portfolio. I hope we have an opportunity to have a deeper discussion about our values, aspirations and find out if we are the right fit together.Let's TalkView PDF
Work experience
product designer
( contract Full time )
Served as the founding designer in the company. Worked very closely with the CEO and engineers to meet the business objectives while establishing best practices in the end-to-end design process by delivering a minimum viable product of the web dashboard for their new service.
product designer
( contract )
Served as the founding designer in the company. Worked very closely with the CEO and engineers to meet the business objectives while establishing best practices in the end-to-end design process by delivering a minimum viable product of the web dashboard for their new service.
expeditor / server
Developed interpersonal and communication skills in a highly collaborative and incalculably high paced environment. We work collectively to achieve a common goal of providing great service while dealing with unexpected situations. understanding your audience is critical in products and it turns out it applies to good hospitality as well, this skill has allowed me to tailor an experience based on the audience I am interacting with during service.
education
ui / ux design specialization
michael worthington & Roman Jaster
Certificate program offered by CALARTS through the coursera platform. Program currently in progress. Thus far this program has allowed me to develop a more well-rounded understanding of the best practices in interface design while developing good critique skills due to the fact that assignments are peer reviewed.
typography 01
chris do
Typography is the gateway to understanding foundational design principles. This course has taught me the principles of layout, contrast, repetition, hierarchy, proximity, alignment and scale while creating visually appealing typographic pieces of work.
ux for freelancers
anfisa bogomolova
From business development to understanding heuristics in UX design, this course goes incredibly in-depth into each phase of the design process while also teaching freelancers how to acquire clients.
Some of the concepts I learned in this course include conducting primary and secondary research, user journey and persona development, biases in user behaviour, just to name a few.
ux design fundamentals
joe natoli
Joe's incredible teaching style gave me a clear understanding of the core concepts for UX design. This overview course gave me the tools to understand the surface-level processes that occur during the end-to-end design process such as identifying business needs and user needs, An overview to conducting research, defining functional specs and content requirements.
how to build a startup
steve blank & kathleen mullaney
Having an understanding of the philosophies and decision-making at a company gives you the tools as a designer to communicate ideas in a more tangible way.
This course allowed me to develop core concepts in business like product validation through the sprint framework, customer development, business models, revenue models and much more.
Bachelor of Computer Science
During my time at Douglas I focused my studies on developing and applying foundational concepts of software development into mobile-centric applications using Java and Python.
competencies
Design
product strategy
user research
Experience Design
stylescapes
interface design
prototyping & interaction design
Usability testing moderator
Design thinking workshop facilitator
development
Python
Java
Webflow
languages
spanish (native)
english (fluent)
Side Project
parkit
Finding parking is extremely difficult, and the process is incredibly inaccessible. This self-initiated project aims to reform the user experience of finding parking by leveraging emerging technologies like voice.
Context
Long story short
Preception is an early-stage startup whose mission is in leveraging technology to measure and train awareness and decision making for professional athletes.
I had the privilege of joining the team as they were embarking on the mission to obtain venture capital investment and was tasked with developing an MVP for their analytics dashboard.
meet the man behind it all
What's up, Leigh?
Former professional soccer player turned coach for the Vancouver White Caps FC, Leigh discovered that the difference between the elite and average athletes lies in their ability to understand and shape the environment around them to ultimately make the right play.
In his book “Preception” Leigh details the different facets of developing these skills, ultimately leading to the founding idea for Preception.
THE CHALLENGE
Creating the blueprint
With only 5 months our challenge was to identify the products' core value through strategy and research to ultimately deliver the blueprint for a web-based analytics tool.
The
Role
My role was primarily to work with the CEO closely on defining our product strategy along with translating preliminary research insights into mocked up high fidelity deliveries of our MVP.
Furthermore I worked alongside our lead engineer from the very start to ensure we were in alignment throughout the process. We used methods like rapid prototyping to communicate interactions and real time collaboration within our design tool for early feedback on technical feasibility.
My involvement with the project ended once the final design was approved and handed off successfully
The
Constraints
primary research
The team had conducted preliminary research before I joined, therefore I focused my efforts towards gathering insights that directly relate to the product and our users.
technical feasibility
In addition, technical constraints helped inform the final design and trade offs had to be made on specific aspects of the product that would require more time to build.
user testing
Unfortunately doing first hand user testing with our target audience proved a lot more difficult to coordinate. Therefore I utilized the dogfooding technique to perform usability testing amongst my team.
defining
success
The primary metric we used to define success was very unique. Leigh's primary objective was to secure venture funding and he felt that having a polished prototype that could clearly communicate its' purpose would help in that.
kickoff
start with a question
How can we better understand an elite athlete?
Observe
Orient
act
Decide
The
ooda loop
Most commonly known for its implementation in military training, it turns out the OODA loop is also very much applicable to the professional sports' analysis of athletes. This framework allows us to better understand the individual steps that an athlete takes to make a decision every millisecond.
While we can easily identify which players are better than others through standard statistical measures, they are not vey good at showing us WHY they're better. The OODA loop gets us a step closer.
discovery
the value of data in sports
The first phase of the project began with me trying to frame and understand the problem while also getting to know our target audience. I wanted to know why this was important and how it fit within the grander scope of datas' utility such as training regimens and its' role in the business of professional sports.
$4.5B
Market Worth
+43.5%
Market Growth
+33%
Player Value
The
goal of the research
Have a deep understanding of the problem space and our target audience by learning how they currently view the problem and what current methods they use to solve it.
questions to frame research direction
1. How do they currently solve this problem?
2. How would they leverage this data?
3. How important is this problem to them?
4. Would athletes train differently with this type of data?
5. What is the business outcome of solving this problem?
Experience and eye maturation of trainers has been the traditional form of measuring this type of data.
Kevin Harmse
former mLS player and current SFU coach
key
insights
metrics' role in business
From a business perspective, data is used to show a players value when it comes time to renegotiate a contract. This not only solidifies it's business utility but furthers the importance of showing more detailed metrics that can tell the whole story.
cognitive training methods
Training is a huge aspect in how data is utilized. It became clear that current methods of training didn't cater to developing decision-making skills, and it was because the specific metrics needed to measure were ones not easily identifiable with the current tools being used.
training philosophy
For athletes, training usually involves some sort of physical activity. But what happens when an athlete suffers an injury? Not only does it cease them from performing; But when they return to play, they usually require time to get their body back to game shape; Because of that, training your decision-making can help balance out what they may lack in physical ability with better decision making.
The
problem statement
Professional sports teams have difficulty making the mental aspect of their sport more tangible and actionable within their current training methods.
analyze
turning insights to actions
After gathering the data I needed, I then mapped the insights-In conjunction with the problem statement to not only define our user but also help inform our product strategy moving forward.
understanding our
audience
We determined that there were two primary audiences; the athlete and the training staff; We decided to focus on the athlete primarily because their motivations are at the core of our mission.
frustrations
1. Organization politics
2. Lack of opportunity within team
3. Adapting to change in coaching
4. Media
motivations
1. Return from injury
2. Lack of job security
3. Contract negotiations
Leon castillo
age
24
occupation
Professional soccer player
goals
1. Improve performance
2. Earn a higher salary
3. Have more control over trajectory of career
looking at our
competitors
Using the data we've gathered, we were able to identify two core components that would make up our feature set for our MVP.
key features
1. Wearable tech
2. Video Analysis
3. Analytics
4. Custom simulations
THE product strategy
defining our mvp
During our competitive analysis we determined the following. Our competitors are very strong at one specific thing but when you bring those together, you then have the solution that truly solves our users pain points.
Key features
analytics
video review
reframing The
problem statement
How might we help make decision-making training more tangible to improve performance
ideation
let curiosity
take over
Early wireframes
Leigh (Left) and lead engineer Taric (Right) during early prototype testing
design
make it visible, make it tangible
outcomes
design
starts now
the
impact
Our MVP sought out to accomplish one thing. To communicate the value of intangible analytics and while Preception continues to be on the hunt for venture capital, It's reputation as a company with great promise under the guidance of Launch Academy's accelerator program continues to validate that the company is on the right track.
the
learnings
One of the biggest lessons I took away from this project is the importance of validating ideas with your target audience. I learned that resources are tightly held by stakeholders and as a result we as designers have the responsibility to find creative ways to block assumptions from being the compass of a product.
