Melissa is available for hire
Hire MelissaMelissa Quintanilha
Verified Expert in Design
Designer
Seattle, WA, United States
Toptal member since April 6, 2017
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.
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
Portfolio
Autonomous Driving UX
WireframingUI DesignUX DesignProduct DesignVisual Design
Microsoft Connected Car
Interaction Design (IxD)UI DesignUX DesignProduct DesignVisual Design
Digital Drive
UI DesignUX DesignProduct DesignVisual Design
Life Hack
UI DesignUX DesignProduct DesignVisual Design
Automotive Predictive UX
WireframingUI DesignUX DesignProduct DesignVisual Design
Microsoft System Center Service Manager
WireframingUI DesignUX DesignProduct DesignVisual DesignDashboard Design
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)
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