Hans van de Bruggen
Verified Expert in Design
Designer
San Francisco, CA, United States
Toptal member since January 20, 2022
Hans has been obsessed with design ever since building a website at 14 that helped to lift his family out of poverty. He has led design at startups and industry giants like Netflix and LinkedIn, has been interviewed as a subject matter expert by the New York Times, and his work has been featured in publications like TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, Wired, PCMag, BGR, Variety, and Esquire. Hans is also the author of Learnability Isn't Enough, a guide to designing interfaces for heavy use.
Portfolio
Work Experience
Product & Design Advisor
General Task
- Guided all product and design efforts for the company, including new feature development and branding, in a short-term capacity.
- Managed a small team of designers of varying experience levels.
- Led a company rebrand in record time, producing a new identity in two weeks. The rebrand caught the attention of the popular design and brand blog Abduzeedo, catapulting our product to the top one on Product Hunt before ending the day at the top two.
Senior Product Designer
Netflix
- Designed an internal tool for determining release dates of upcoming titles as a drop-in replacement to existing pencil-and-paper workflows. The tool was designed and built within six months, had 100% adoption, and required half the expected training.
- Created an internal database of global film industry talent meant to centralize data and serve as a hybrid IMDb-meets-CRM. This tool also achieved 100% adoption with its initial audience and required the least follow-up training of any internal tool.
- Designed a robust Gantt scheduling tool to aid in scheduling pre, physical, and post-production timelines. This tool allowed teams to shift away from spreadsheet-based scheduling, saving considerable time and effort.
- Conceived the Project Rumble Pak for a hack day, leading to international headlines in lead tech, film, and culture publications. The feature brings haptic vibrations to kids' content on Netflix, enabling a more exciting and immersive experience.
Senior Product Designer
Blue Apron
- Oversaw the onboarding flows design for the growth team, creating multivariate tests for mobile web and desktop. Spearheaded a gift card campaign with the legal, marketing and communications, and logistics teams' support, achieving dramatic success.
- Kickstarted and officiated the companywide hack day.
- Partnered with the head of design to develop new homepage redesign concepts for the CEO and top company leadership.
Senior Director of Product Design
Pypestream
- Led a team to redesign the proof-of-concept app into a viable mass-market app. Also designed tools for channel managers to manage broadcasts and campaigns, and tools for call-centers to more easily read and respond to incoming messages.
- Spearheaded a chatbot-centered redesign that quickly became the company's top priority. This came with a substantial update to the app's information architecture and new shareable mobile web landing pages.
- Concepted a point-and-click chatbot builder UI geared toward non-technical users.
Head of Design
Cureatr
- Oversaw comprehensive redesigns of our iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and web apps. Focused on usability concerns of a niche userbase, including nurses and physicians in a hospital setting.
- Championed a redesign of the quick messages feature, which resulted in massive gains in the feature and the overall app usage.
- Created a UI kit and style guide codenamed Cascadia to address user needs while being easy for the development team to understand and implement.
Senior UX Designer
Atlassian
- Designed and launched new features for Bitbucket and Bitbucket Server, then called Stash. Notable features included diff tools for code and images, code search improvements, and a sidebar redesign for most Atlassian products that lasted 6+ years.
- Led the design for the nascent growth team, designing onboarding experiments for Stash, Confluence, Jira, and other Atlassian products.
- Built up the team's skillset by developing frameworks and led workshops on prototyping tools, most notably Quartz Composer.
User Experience Designer
- Designed the skills endorsements feature that was used over a billion times in the first five months and got special recognition on that quarter's earnings call. It was found to directly increase the engagement of every major feature across the site.
- Helped grow the site from 161 million to over 200 million in under a year as a member of the growth team. Worked on redesigning the LinkedIn.com global landing page that remained in use between 2013 and 2015.
- Got the company's first-ever incubator program award. I oversaw the creation of a site-touring tool as a designer and product manager. The open-source tool, Hopscotch, received 4,300 stars on GitHub and was forked nearly 700 times.
- Won more company hack days than any other designer, leading to shipping new products and features and having four patents filed.
Skills
Tools
Sketch, Figma, Principle, Origami Studio, Origami, InVision, Zeplin, Adobe Fireworks, Adobe Flash, Spreadsheets, Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, Stash, Quartz Composer, DaVinci Resolve
Platforms
Android, iOS, Mobile, Messenger Bots, Web
Languages
CSS, HTML
Other
Internal Apps, Growth, User Onboarding, Hackathons, iPhone, Web App Design, Mobile Web, Mobile UI, B2C, UI Design, UI Animation, Visual Design, Product Design, Rapid Prototyping, UI Prototyping, MVP Design, Design Systems, Wireframing, Prototyping, Responsive Web Apps, Dashboard Design, UX Design, User Interface (UI), User Experience (UX), Design Leadership, User Flows, Mockups, Design Libraries, Dashboards, SaaS Design, Mobile Design, Color Palettes, UX Wireframes, Web Design, System Design, Mobile UX Design, Mobile UI Design, Low-fidelity Prototypes, Mobile App Design, Interaction Design (IxD), Responsive Web Design (RWD), Websites, Design, UX Prototyping, DataViz, Style Guides, Mood Boards, Material Design, SaaS, Layout Design, B2B, User Journeys, Branding, User Stories, Chatbots, UX Workshops, User Research, Interviews, Design Sprints, Logo Design, eCommerce UX, DevOps, Scheduling, Calendars, Calendar Design, Collaboration, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Cross-functional Design, Cross-functional Collaboration, Growth Hacking, Gantt Chart, Mobile UX, Mobile Apps, Healthcare Management Systems, Healthcare Services, HIPAA Compliance, Messenger, Message UI, B2C Marketing, eCommerce, Mobile eCommerce, Social Networks, User Engagement, Startups, Pixate, Framer, B2B2C, Data Visualization, Fintech, Writing & Editing, Digital Banking
Experience
Tools
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