Amy Eastment
Verified Expert in Design
Designer
Boston, MA, United States
Toptal member since September 7, 2016
Amy is a UX design consultant with over a decade of experience collaborating with startups to build cutting-edge products in both B2B and B2C. She tackles tough design problems with empathy, enthusiasm, curiosity, and a sense of humor. Having worked as an engineer, product manager, user researcher, and now a designer, she is familiar with the challenges of the product life cycle and adapts her approach to meet every client's unique needs.
Portfolio
Multi-platform Privacy and Password Management
MixTape | Musical Social Sharing App
O'Reilly Course: User Research 101
Work Experience
Product and UX Design Consultant
Freelance Work
- Transformed ideas quickly into wireframes and prototypes that demonstrate functionality for sales calls, VC pitches, or engineering.
- Tackled many thorny problems (complex workflows, lots of data, niche industries), resulting in attractive, usable, powerful dashboards and tools.
- Created several new self-serve onboarding experiences to help prospects explore service offerings and ultimately convert into paying customers.
- Collaborated with customers and customer success to remove points of friction in SaaS platforms.
- Implemented heuristic analyses of products, platforms, and apps with an eye for improving usability, accessibility, and overall user experience.
- Designed data visualizations and dashboards for both B2B and B2C audiences.
- Mentored junior user experience designers and product managers.
- Built trust with customers through social signaling, inclusion, and accessibility improvements.
Staff Product Designer
Kolena
- Led a rapid iteration-driven design process for the overhaul of their V1 platform based on customer feedback and changing business needs.
- Collaborated with product, data science, engineering, and customer success teams for the design of key initiatives such as easier-to-use reporting, better data visualizations, and incorporating natural language search/annotations into the platform.
- Partnered with front-end engineering to improve the usability of our established component library patterns and create new, extensible patterns for current and future needs.
Staff Product Designer
Chronosphere
- Led design efforts for a fast-paced experimental team, delivering rapid design iterations and prototypes to enhance the functionality of the observability platform.
- Conducted extensive persona research with both internal and external stakeholders, resulting in highly regarded personas that served to guide product and engineering planning and discussion.
- Collaborated closely with front-end engineers to rapidly iterate and improve upon key data visualizations, including a service map topology view and critical dashboard annotations.
- Mentored junior designers on the team and onboarded new members of a rapidly growing team.
Lead Product Designer
Alyce
- Addressed and overcame several user interface and back-end limitations caused by rapid-fire pivots during the course of the pandemic, resulting in a more cohesive and usable platform.
- Designed, prototyped, tested, and launched new functionality that significantly improved gifting efficiency and helped reduce churn with customers facing adoption issues.
- Collaborated closely with engineering to implement design enhancements across the platform with each functional release.
- Streamlined and enhanced internal administrative tooling for better ease-of-use and increased productivity for our enablement- and customer support teams.
- Led research and design thinking projects to guide the company's strategic direction during a pivotal phase of the pandemic.
- Managed and guided an overseas contractor in building a new design system in Figma.
Company Advisor
Campus Insights
- Helped the Campus Insights team scope and plan user research & usability testing studies studies.
- Built out templates for various deliverables.
- Provided strategic guidance.
Design Lead
BitSight
- Launched a new, major flagship product built atop complex node graph data, including inventing a new patent-pending business-user-friendly data visualization for exploring massive quantities of data in a scaleable way.
- Owned the designs for all of BitSight's product lines. The ease of use for the BitSight Platform interface is cited as a contributing factor in the majority of sales win reports.
- Worked across teams to evaluate numerous big data streams and design appropriate visualizations for each one to best enable users’ decision-making.
- Collaborated with the product and marketing teams to conduct interviews to inform personas, product road maps, and iterate on product designs.
- Contributed to company growth, mentoring junior team members, coordinating fun events, and helping with the office design.
Instructor | Curriculum Developer
Startup Institute
- Instructed and mentored students in design, front-end development, and product management on an ongoing basis.
- Helped with major revisions to the product/design track curriculum, including creation of lesson plans for instructors and changes/new content for student labs and intensives.
Director of Product/UX
CustomMade
- Conducted usability testing and informational interviewing to guide the development of the new platform, improve site usability, and inform frequent messaging and a major rebranding effort.
- Owned the product road map, feature prioritization based on KPIs, and balancing team efforts across platform and internal operational projects.
- Documented use cases and anticipated functionality.
- Wireframed screens, features, and flows for CustomMade's transition from a portfolio website to a transaction platform.
Lead QA and Usability Engineer
HubSpot
- Worked directly with product owners, engineers, and customer-facing team to address usability, product defects, synchronize teams' expectations of new releases, and expediting the fixes of customer issues.
- Designed, tested, and implemented new features with the collaboration of developers.
- Performed user testing for new and existing features, interpreting and sharing results.
- Performed bug tracking, triage, and periodic "holistic" bug analysis for trends to improve our coverage.
- Collaborated with the engineering team to scale testing resources to meet R&D needs.
- Trained new hires and managed a team of QA engineers.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science and Writing
MIT | Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Cambridge, MA, USA
Skills
Tools
Apple Keynote, Google Docs, InVision, Balsamiq, Sketch, Tableau, Adobe Photoshop, Aseprite, Logic Pro, GameMaker Studio, Zeplin
Platforms
Mobile, Windows UI, MacOS, Android, iOS, Figma, iAd
Industry Expertise
Cybersecurity
Other
Mobile App Design, Interviews, Sketching, Onboarding, SaaS, Enterprise, Website Redesign, Mobile UX, Social Design, Presentations, UI Design, Product Design, Dashboard Design, Dating Apps, HR Tools, Material Design, DevOps, Mobile Design, User Journeys, Project Estimation, User Flows, User Interface (UI), Competitor Analysis & Profiling, Technical Training, Game Design, Audits, Lean UX, Microcopy, Interaction Design (IxD), Heuristic Analysis, Information Design, App Design, Personas, User Research, User Experience (UX), Data Visualization, Information Architecture (IA), Wireframing, Prototyping, Usability Testing, User Testing, Market Research, UX Design, Design Leadership, PowerPoint Design, B2B, B2C, eCommerce, Web UX, Web Design, Mobile Apps, Responsive Web Design (RWD), Big Data, Holistic UX Design, Mockups, Enterprise Design, Enterprise SaaS, Complex Application User Interfaces (UI), Web App Design, SaaS Design, Internet of Things (IoT), Wearables, Accessibility, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, Pixel Art, Music Composition, Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), Artificial Intelligence as a Service (AIaaS), Machine Learning Automation, Computer Science
Experience
- Product Design - 9 years
- User Research - 8 years
- Data Visualization - 7 years
- User Experience (UX) - 7 years
- UX Design - 6 years
- Information Architecture (IA) - 5 years
- Interaction Design (IxD) - 5 years
- Game Design - 3 years
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