Melissa Quintanilha, Designer in Seattle, WA, United States
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Melissa Quintanilha

Bio

Melissa is a fractional design leader and senior UX designer with 25 years of experience. She spent seven years at Microsoft and a decade running Dupla Studios, an IxDA Award finalist, and is now embedded with B2B SaaS and hardware startups on retainers. Melissa's work spans interaction design, design systems, complex workflows, and design-to-engineering handoff. Clients benefit from the strategic thinking of a design director and the execution of a senior individual contributor.

Portfolio

Work Experience

Founder & Principal Designer

2015 - PRESENT
Dupla Studios
  • Built a product design consultancy whose clients included Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Smartsheet, and MURAL over a decade.
  • Named an IxDA Interaction Design Award finalist—one of the highest honors in the global interaction design field.
  • Designed UX for a safety-critical portable ventilator, balancing FDA compliance requirements with clinical usability.
  • Led end-to-end UX and strategy for a B2B referral and loyalty marketing platform: dashboards, RBAC, compliance workflows, and design system.
  • Designed IoT health monitoring UX for a senior care startup, supporting key partnership deals ahead of product launch.
  • Created automotive UX concepts for Ford and Porsche, designing cross-platform in-vehicle and companion app experiences.
  • Transitioned practice to fractional design leadership, embedded with seed-stage B2B SaaS and hardware startups on retainer.
  • Delivered hardware and software UX for a consumer health device, completing current state assessment and end-to-end user flow mapping.
Technologies: Figma, FigJam, Claude, Notion, Confluence, Jira, Microsoft 365, Loom, Miro

Senior UX Designer

2013 - 2015
Microsoft Research FUSE Labs
  • Incubated Calendar.help, an AI scheduling assistant that shipped into Microsoft Office 365 and was featured in Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2017/07/how-we-built-a-virtual-scheduling-assistant-at-microsoft.
  • Designed UX for AI and conversational bot projects around social productivity, years before the technology went mainstream.
  • Led mobile UX projects integrating objects of conversation into Outlook, collaborating directly with partner architects.
  • Led Microsoft Design Expo 2015, coordinating eight top international design universities; served as Microsoft's liaison for two Brazilian programs in 2014–15.
Technologies: Product Design, Microsoft 365

Senior UX Designer

2011 - 2013
Microsoft
  • Envisioned next-generation automotive UX for Microsoft Connected Car, from early ideation through wireframing and visual design.
  • Presented Microsoft's automotive UX vision to Fiat/Chrysler, Ford, Mercedes, BMW, and IDEO as a company representative.
  • Designed multi-modal in-vehicle interactions across touch, voice, controller, steering wheel, gaze, and gesture inputs.
  • Led UX design for System Center Service Manager, an award-winning enterprise IT management platform spanning desktop and web.
  • Founded a design integrators team, transferring UI ownership to the UX team for the first time in the product's history.
  • Delivered WPF and Silverlight control libraries used across the full product suite, reducing UX bugs by the hundreds.
  • Designed a cross-discipline process governing collaboration between design, PM, engineering, and QA.
Technologies: Product Design

User Experience Designer

2007 - 2008
Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD)
  • Led UX and interaction design for Synchronous Objects, an award-winning interactive data visualization that attracted over a million visitors from 90+ countries.
  • Featured in the New York Times and curated international exhibitions. The project toured globally for over a decade as an installation.
  • Worked on a radically multidisciplinary team spanning computer science, dance, geography, architecture, philosophy, and animation.
Technologies: Product Design, Interaction Design (IxD), Data Visualization, Prototyping

Education

2005 - 2008

Master of Fine Arts Degree in Interaction Design

The Ohio State University - Columbus, OH (USA)

1997 - 2003

Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science

Federal University of Rio de Janeiro - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Skills

Tools

Claude, FigJam, Confluence, Miro, Jira

Platforms

Figma

Other

Wireframing, Interaction Design (IxD), Information Architecture (IA), UX Design, B2B, Product Design, Visual Design, Dashboard Design, Concepting, Design Systems, UX Strategy, Design Leadership, User Research, UI Design, Prototyping, Notion, Data Visualization, SaaS Design, Loom, Microsoft 365, Human-computer Interaction (HCI)

Experience

  • UX Design - 20 years
  • Interaction Design (IxD) - 20 years
  • Design Systems - 20 years
  • Product Design - 15 years
  • Dashboard Design - 15 years
  • Design Leadership - 11 years
  • UX Strategy - 11 years
  • Information Architecture (IA) - 10 years
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