Nikos Pappas
Verified Expert in Design
Designer
Athens, Central Athens, Greece
Toptal member since January 12, 2018
Nikos is an accomplished UX and design leader with a wealth of experience in various industries, including but not limited to banking, retail, and tourism. With a track record of success in driving UX and design strategy, Nikos has a keen eye for creating elevating experiences. As a strategic thinker with a strong product-led mindset, Nikos excels at leading cross-functional teams, building successful products, and delivering results.
Work Experience
UX Team Lead
Workable
- Spearheaded the establishment of UX metrics across all products, enhancing the ability to monitor user behavior and client satisfaction and leading to an increase in actionable insights.
- Led a team of three UX researchers and analysts within an 18-member design team, driving the completion of over 15 online experiments per month, including A/B/n testing, resulting in improved product design decisions.
- Conducted comprehensive client research, directly contributing to a significant improvement in user engagement and client retention through data-driven design improvements.
Director, UX
Dialectica
- Grew a bold UX team (from one to seven UX designers and researchers), contributing to organizational goals.
- Cultivated a user-centric, outcome-over-output mindset across the product team and repositioned the role of UX in the company.
- Led a wide range of initiatives, from building Dialectica's first design system to delivering successful projects with a high impact on our client service quality (up to 20% faster delivery).
UX Director, Group
Eurobank
- Crafted the UX vision, along with a plan for evolutionary, iterative updates that actualized the larger company vision over time.
- Defined the UX research and design processes and agenda, building a team that, through research, identifies critical customer goals and journeys.
- Created experiences that are cohesive, inclusive, data-informed, and empathy-driven. This approach led to noticeable results across products and services, such as an impressive +235% in lead generation or a +35% in conversions for certain funnels.
- Imparted day-to-day product design leadership in a way that fosters a shared understanding of the user-centric intersection between design, content, sales, business, and engineering.
- Led a team of 15 high-flying professionals (product designers, UX researchers, and UX writers).
- Built a state-of-the-art UX research lab and all the processes around it.
- Led the creation of Eurobank's first design system to cover the organization's design needs, from ATMs to the mobile app.
Senior Product Designer, Group
FTI Group
- Crafted digital experiences for an international audience of thousands of tour operators and travel agents. ANIXE - FTI Group's internet booking engine (IBE), Youtravel.com, supplies accommodation, transfer, and excursion products.
- Led and coordinated the service design and user experience research activities across key locations and markets, such as Dubai (UAE), London (UK), Malta, and Orlando (US), to ensure that all target audiences' needs were considered and addressed.
- Improved the conversion channels on Youtravel.com by designing experiences around users' needs and wants.
- Analyzed how users utilized the search module and decreased the average search time per task from 21.2 to 5.35 seconds (-74.8%); minimized users' average number of attempts to find what they were looking for from 3.4 to 1.8 (-45.9%).
- Deployed monitoring tools and established processes that provided a clear overview of customers' overall experience with Youtravel's IBE so that our Agile teams could promptly detect swifts in the market and/or user behavior and respond quickly.
Senior Product Designer and Interim Product Owner
Home Run
- Defined the product vision for Home Run's partner and shopper web and mobile applications. Designed new processes and crafted new experiences for Home Run's partners.
- Fostered closer collaboration between product and operations teams to improve two key business metrics: units collected per hour (UPH), which soared by 88%, and on-time performance (OTP), which reached 97%.
- Led the UX, CX, and SD activities for customer-facing and partner products, from usability testing to customer journey maps and service blueprinting. Defined and prioritized new feature development.
- Leveraged usability optimization to improve the path to purchase and customer engagement by analyzing users' behavior and conducting online testing of features, structures, and user interface design approaches to boost conversions.
- Increased conversion for certain customer segments by an impressive 320%. Monitored vital CX-related KPIs (e.g., NPS, complaint frequency and type, and retention cohorts) to identify improvement opportunities.
- Designed and organized the final UI elements into design systems, interactions, and style guidelines.
- Contributed to creating and executing the campaign for Home Run's successful equity crowdfunding round on Seedrs.
- Improved Home Run's partner app results for harnessing technology and design thinking to improve operations: UPH soared by 88%, OTP reached 97%, and communication had 65x fewer messages between operations and partners.
Senior Product Designer
Vidpulse
- Worked for Vidpulse (SaaS), an advanced video content analytics and recommendations tool that helps digital publishers uncover viewing habits, recirculate traffic, and measure video ad performance.
- Led the UX research (qualitative and quantitative) for reEmbed's new platform, Vidpulse.
- Played an active role in the strategy formulation and definition of the product development roadmap.
- Crafted Vidpulse's online video analytics platform (dashboard) from scratch.
- Designed the final UI elements and organized them into design systems, interactions, and style guidelines.
- Significantly improve reEmbed's recommendation feature through a deep design, including the information structure, interaction design, and user interface.
- Tested the recommendation feature constantly by deploying tailor-made A/B/N experiments and a sample of hundreds of thousands of users who were exposed to the feature on a daily basis.
- Achieved an average 55.40% improvement in our core mobile KPI: end screen-to-page CTR.
- Created a new mobile video gallery experience for digital publishers that aimed to boost video content consumption and user engagement.
Digital Product Designer
ELTRUN
- Conducted user experience research: contextual research, ethnography, empathy maps, user journey maps, product/market fit mapping, usability testing, etc.
- Participated in digital strategy formation and crafted the user experience strategy.
- Created the final UI elements for various mobile, desktop, and billboard applications.
- Facilitated design workshops with various stakeholders.
- Designed the visual narrative and supervised the final implementation of various awarded and innovative digital projects for FMCG suppliers and retailers, like Nestlé, J&J, and Ahold (AB Vassilopoulos).
Education
Master of Arts Degree in Digital Communication
American College of Greece - Athens, Greece
Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics
University of Athens - Athens, Greece
Certifications
NN/g UX Certification
Nielsen Normal Group
Managing the Company of the Future
London Business School
Product Management: Building a Product Roadmap
Scrum: Advanced
Fostering Innovation
Agile Product Owner
User Experience
Lynda.com
Facebook Blueprint
Gamification
The Wharton School
Art and Inquiry
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Skills
Tools
Hotjar, Google Analytics, Figma, Miro, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Experience Design (XD), Sketch, Photoshop CC, Principle, Draw.io, Zeplin, InVision, UX Tools, Balsamiq Mockups, RealtimeBoard, Treejack, Balsamiq, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe CC, Illustrator CC, Microsoft Power BI
Platforms
iOS, Android, Dovetail
Industry Expertise
Retail & Wholesale
Other
Mobile UI, App UX, Usability, eCommerce UI, eCommerce UX, eCommerce, Mobile Design, Mobile UX Design, Mobile-first Design, Personas, Persona Design, Story Mapping, Ethnography, Design Research, User Journey Maps, Grocery Delivery, Responsive Design, Mobile Web, Online Research, A/B Testing, Conversion, Engagement Strategy, Mobile UI Design, User Interface (UI), Dashboard Design, Web Dashboards, Responsive Layout, Interviews, SaaS Design, Enterprise SaaS, Adobe UX, Web UX Design, Web UI Design, UX Analysis, Digital Communication, Dashboards, Data Visualization, High-fidelity Prototypes, Material Design, SaaS, Web App Design, Web Design, Service Design, Usability Testing, UX Review, UX Research, Usability Guidelines, Mobile UX, Prototyping, iOS Design, UX Design, Tree Testing, User Flows, User Journeys, UI Design, Customer Experience, Mobile Mockups, User Experience (UX), Card Sorting, Digital Product Design, Service Blueprints, UI Blueprints, Customer Blueprints, Blueprint, Product Design, Consumer-facing Product Design, Design Production, Field Studies, Field Research, Usability Analysis, System Usability, Web Usability, Remote Usability Testing, Usability Heuristics, Usability Engineering, Mobile App UI, Mobile Apps, Web & Mobile Applications, Mobile App Design, Product Strategy, Social Media Design, Web UI, Responsive Web Design (RWD), ZenHub, Metabase, Digital Publishing, Data Analysis, Interaction Design (IxD), UX Strategy, UX Testing, Teamwork, Team Building, Team Management, Distributed Team Management, Product Leadership, UX Leadership, Research Synthesis, Design Systems, Mobile Banking, Online Banking, Digital Banking, Consumer Banking, Team Leadership, UX Roadmaps, Lean Experiments
Experience
Tools
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