Melissa is available for hire
Hire MelissaMelissa Jaen
Verified Expert in Design
UX Designer
Location
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Toptal Member Since
June 20, 2019
Melissa holds a master’s degree in linguistics and is currently earning another master’s in design. Recently, she’s combined her background of ethnographic research (six years) and intuitive design solution (three years) and utilized those strengths when working on voice-user interface systems for multimillion-dollar companies. Melissa also loves to do UX copy and discovering cultural and linguistic implications in localization.
Portfolio
Work Experience
VUI/UX Consultant
2018 - PRESENT
Dimension Data
- Assisted in the creation and testing of a bilingual voice user interface menu for a Florida health insurance agency, including the QA portion of more than three hundred distinct utterances in English and Spanish, resulting in an improved interface that reaches millions.
- Rapidly translated a voice-only interface to DTMF in under a month, while also resolving voice-to-touchtone logic errors, thus creating an accessible alternative experience for users.
- Searched for areas of confusion and possible misinterpretation in multiple languages.
- Proactively learned Goldwave in order to edit recorded UI utterances down to the 300-millisecond mark for an improved and more natural linguistic experience.
Technologies: GoldWave, Microsoft Excel
Design Mentor
2016 - PRESENT
Bloc
- Mentored more than fifty students in their pursuit of becoming UX designers, including providing career and life support, design critiques, and proactive extracurricular suggestions to create strong and sustainable designers.
- Worked as the official Los Angeles in-person product presenter, delivering presentations twice a month for approximately six months to groups of prospective design students.
- Wrote original content for and delivered four career and design workshops on a weekly basis, including how to deal with imposter syndrome, how to interview with the STAR method, asking interview questions, and hosting student alumni AMAs; these workshops reached more than two hundred students total, and garnered a 100% positive review rate amongst attendees.
- Works as a live technical coach in the student Slack channels, resolving anywhere between 8-30 student tickets in a four-hour window, on topics ranging from UX research to design feedback to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; maintained a 95% positive feedback score from students.
- Reviewed and graded approximately ten assignments a week on all topics of UX ranging from research to design to coding.
Technologies: InVision, Figma, Sketch
Product Designer
2017 - 2018
ATTN:
- Spearheaded a company-wide internal personas project, interviewing and building personas for 30+ employees.
- Formulated the UX copy best practices guidelines concerning titling internal assets for ATTN:’s search engine for use across a team of more than 100.
- Led research, design, and testing as a principle designer on TrueView, a proprietary prototyping tool for Facebook posts, created for internal tooling purposes and utilized by a team of more than 50.
- Co-led the ATTN.com redesign and consulted on language, copy and brand voice for use on the website and its new marketing objective. The full design took approximately three months, and the final product obtained more than 300,000 impressions daily on last access to analytics.
- Worked alongside multimillion-dollar clients such as Everytown for Gun Safety, Moen, Discover, and 15:17 to Paris to design, test, and refine white-paper microsites and digital experiences.
Technologies: Dropbox, CodePen, Principle, InVision, Sketch
Web Designer
2017 - 2017
PatientPop
- Designed and iterated on more than ten high-converting websites per day for a physician clientele nationwide.
- Contributed to the development and testing of proprietary design tool, Atomic, and helped to create design solutions that would positively affect a team of seven.
- Facilitated training to a team of five on HTML as the team's HTML/CSS subject matter expert.
- Met with approximately three external clients per day to define product needs, expectations, and deliverables.
- Assisted with internal training of design best practices across three teams of more than 40 people to better capacitate coworkers in expectation setting for clients.
- Advocated for improved UX practices across the company.
Technologies: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop
Education
2019 - 2020
Master's Degree in Design
Barcelona School of Art and Design - Barcelona, Spain
2016 - 2017
Certification in User Experience
Bloc - Chicago, IL, USA
2012 - 2016
Master's Degree in Linguistics
Northeastern Illinois University - Chicago, IL, USA
2009 - 2009
Post Graduate Work in Marketing and Advertising
La Universidad Latina de Panama - Panama City, Panama
2003 - 2007
Bachelor's Degree in International Relations
Loyola University Chicago - Chicago, IL, USA
Experience
Collaboration That Works
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