George Dan Foia
Verified Expert in Design
Designer
Oradea, Bihor County, Romania
Toptal member since April 20, 2021
George, or Mr. Pixel, is an award-winning web and mobile lead UX and UI designer with over 18 years of experience. He has led the design efforts of the UK's only medical class one app, downloaded by more than 24 million users and rated 4.6 stars in the App Store. George has also led the design efforts for one of the world's largest banks' mobile banking apps, with 6+ million users, and raised its 1.9 rating to 4.8 in the App Store. He designs beautiful interfaces that achieve business goals.
Experience
- UI Design - 15 years
- UX Design - 10 years
- User-centered Design (UCD) - 7 years
- Mobile Apps - 7 years
- Mobile App Design - 7 years
- Accessibility - 5 years
- Mobile Banking - 4 years
- User Research - 2 years
Portfolio
Financial Transformation Web App
Work Experience
Lead UX and UI Designer | Consultant
Zuhlke
- Led the design efforts of the UK's only medical class 1 app. The app was downloaded by more than 24 million users, had 4.6 stars from over 281,000 reviews in the App Store, and was ranked number one in the medical section.
- Created user scenarios, rich pictures, user flow diagrams, low-fidelity wireframes, AA WCAG 2.1 compliant high-fidelity designs, prototypes, illustrations, and other visual assets, and set up a component library.
- Conducted ideation sessions, Three Amigos workshops, co-design sessions, retrospectives, and stakeholders reviews.
- Presented the UX team's progress in a show and tell, participated in user testing sessions, and set up the UX process and teams interaction.
- Managed a team of five designers, including researchers, distributed remotely in different locations and time zones. Set up the design scope and process, approach, and design direction.
Lead UX and UI Designer
Mr Pixel Studio (Freelance)
- Designed an advanced teaching platform app for iPads, used by public and private schools in China. The platform helped teachers provide bespoke teaching and testing of different student levels.
- Assisted stakeholders to define and prioritize the product roadmap by conducting user and stakeholders interviews, user story mapping, now-next-later roadmap, jobs to be done, user stories, estimations, retrospectives, and show and tells.
- Created user personas and scenarios, conducted competitor analysis, sketched rich pictures, and conducted card sorting workshops and usability testing.
- Designed user flow diagrams, low-fidelity wireframes, high-fidelity designs, prototypes, and design systems.
- Designed numerous websites, illustrations, logos, icons, mobile apps, and other visual assets.
UX/UI Designer (via Toptal)
Lunation, Inc
- Structured and conducted comprehensive activities to gather extensive information about the desired business goals, user values, and other key factors. I conducted stakeholder interviews, created personas, and conducted a user story mapping workshop, among other activities.
- Created low-fidelity user flows, facilitated stakeholders' design review and feedback gathering workshops, high-fidelity designs and prototypes, and accessible designs.
- Contributed to the component library, provided development team support, and worked on branding.
UX Designer
GSC Technologies Limited
- Conducted stakeholder interviews and heuristic and accessibility evaluations of the existing app. Identified and documented the improvement opportunities and prioritized them with the product owner.
- Created several low-fidelity flow variations and wireframes, to communicate the newly proposed concepts, and iterated based on user feedback; then reviewed and signed off on the low-fidelity flows with the stakeholders.
- Constructed mood boards to align with the stakeholders on the visual direction; created high-fidelity designs using best practices component creation.
- Built a component library to ensure visual consistency and design process efficiency.
Lead UX Designer | Bank Consultant
Zuhlke
- Led the design efforts for one of the world's largest bank's mobile banking apps. The app was downloaded by over six million users, gathered 4.8 stars from over 922,000 reviews in the App Store, and was ranked number one in the financial category.
- Conducted ideation sessions, three amigos workshops, co-design sessions, team retrospectives, and stakeholder reviews. Presented the UX team's progress in a show and tell, usability testing, and user interviews.
- Created user scenarios, rich pictures, user flow diagrams, low-fidelity wireframes, high-fidelity designs, prototypes, icons, and design systems.
Senior UX and UI Designer
Citywire
- Designed the events app used by event planners, fund managers, and professional investors to organize and assist different global events.
- Conducted user and stakeholder interviews, created personas, user journey mapping, user scenarios, user flow diagrams, prototypes, and oversaw user testing.
- Created low-fidelity wireframes, high-fidelity designs, logos, and the design system.
- Designed a variety of features for the main Citywire website.
- Created low-fidelity wireframes, high-fidelity designs, design system, social marketing materials, and logos.
Senior UX and UI Designer
First Beat Media (Freelance)
- Designed a content writing marketplace proof-of-concept web app, which allowed content writing specialists to get freelance jobs and other service users to hire content writers based on their custom project requirements.
- Conducted user and stakeholder interviews, created user personas, user story mapping, user flow diagrams, low-fidelity designs, and prototypes, and ran user testing.
- Created numerous website templates used for a large network of websites.
- Designed high-fidelity websites, logos, icons, and other visual assets. Converted high-fidelity websites into HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code.
Senior UI Designer
51 Blocks (Freelance)
- Designed and developed numerous WordPress themes and other website templates.
- Created high-fidelity designs, logos, icons, and other visual assets.
- Converted the designs into HTML, CSS, and JavaScript-functional websites.
UI Designer and Developer
Modulus Media
- Designed a web app that empowered dentists to collaborate, discuss, and share ideas and solutions with their team or other remote dentists.
- Created high-fidelity designs, logos, and other visual assets and converted them into HTML and CSS code.
- Created animated Flash banners and static banners.
Graphic and Interaction Designer
Informmedia
- Maintained, updated, and created new visual elements for a network of several large websites.
- Created animated Flash advertising banners, logos, and other visual assets.
- Developed print designs for several newspapers owned by the company.
Education
Coursework Towards a Degree in Information Technology
University of Oradea - Oradea, Romania
Certificate of Programming in Mathematics & IT
Mihai Eminescu College - Oradea, Romania
Certifications
Leadership Program
Human Centric Leaders
Development Team Of The Year 2021 Award
UK IT Industry Awards
UX Certification
Nielsen Norman Group
Skills
Tools
Sketch, InVision, Flinto, Zeplin, Adobe Experience Design (XD), Asana, Figma Prototyping, Figma Make, Balsamiq, Miro, InVision Studio, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Flash
Languages
HTML, CSS3, CSS, PHP, C
Platforms
Figma, Mobile, iOS, Android, WordPress
Industry Expertise
Banking & Finance, Healthcare
Other
UI Design, UX Design, Stakeholder Management, User Personas, Story Mapping, User Testing, Accessibility, Wireframing, Competitor Analysis & Profiling, Ideation Workshops, Mobile Banking, Mobile Apps, Component Libraries, User Flows, Prototyping, Apple Human Interface, SMACSS, Retro, User Stories, Stakeholder Interviews, Pen & Paper, User-centered Design (UCD), Human Interface Design, Finance, Web App UI, User Experience (UX), User Interface (UI), Accessible Design, iOS UI Design, iOS UX Design, Google Material Design, Mobile App Design, Fintech, Product Design, Web Design, Visual Design, Lean UX, Design Thinking, Design Systems, Mobile Design, Web App Design, iOS App Design, Android App Design, UX Strategy, Agile UX, Design Sprints, Usability Testing, User Journeys, UX Audits, UX Review, Mobile UI, Mobile App UI, Responsive Web Design (RWD), Responsive Web Apps, Web App UX, Customer Journey, User Journey Maps, B2C, Dashboard Design, iOS Design Guidelines, Conversion Rate, MVP Design, Mockups, Apps, App UI, App UX, SaaS Design, App Design, Mobile UX, Responsive UX Design, High-fidelity Mockups, Graphic Design, UX Wireframes, UX Prototyping, Web Usability, Branding, Mobile UX Design, Mobile UI Design, Startups, Feature Prioritization, Dashboards, Style Guides, UI Prototyping, SaaS, Landing Page Design, Audits, Web UX, Product Strategy, Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), Best Practices in Design, Annotated Wireframes, Landing Pages, Workshops, System Design, Paper Prototyping, Rapid Prototyping, User Experience Design, Discovery, Data-informed Visual Design, Web Dashboards, Workshop Facilitation, B2B, Enterprise Design, Complex Application User Interfaces (UI), React Native, Responsive Design, Mobile Applications, Product Discovery, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Enterprise, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Journey Mapping, Front-end Development, User Research, Leadership, User Interviews, Storyboarding, Medical Devices, Medical Applications, BEM, Sass, Bootstrap, Product Roadmaps, Data Visualization, Monetization, Clinical Trials, eCommerce, PSD to HTML, Jobs to be Done (JTBD), Material Design, Proof of Concept (POC), WCAG 2, Illustration, Android UI Design, Online Banking, Financial UX, Interaction Design (IxD), Animation, Logo Design, Case Studies, Agile, Android Design Guidelines, Award-winning, Angular, AngularUI, Syncfusion, iOS Native Libraries, Digital Banking, Design, Research, UX Research, UI Research, Web UI Design, Web UI, Web Accessibility, Project Discovery, Interviews
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