Raymond Sharma
Verified Expert in Design
Designer
Vancouver, BC, Canada
Toptal member since January 30, 2018
Ray is an award-winning, multidisciplinary experience designer, online and off, with 20+ years of experience delivering valuable, usable, engaging, and rewarding experiences for all. He has led organizations and teams, managed products and projects, and worked hands-on to provide design leadership, design thinking strategies, UX research, UX design, interaction design, and creative UI designs.
Portfolio
Work Experience
Lead Product Designer
Altos Labs
- Led the design strategy and the UX and UI design for a one-stop cloud-based bioinformatics solution to access complex technologies meant for scientists who build data applications or perform data analytics to extract insights.
- Delivered user-driven solutions to support Altos in automating the creation and management of computing resources while reducing the costs and the need to maintain a high-end R&D AWS Cloud infrastructure.
- Conducted user research with scientists, developers, and other stakeholders to design interfaces and workflows that promoted learning by doing.
- Leveraged UX and UI methodologies to design a complex application supporting the broad, unstructured goals or nonlinear workflows of highly-trained users in specialized domains.
- Designed and delivered a robust design system for applications across Altos that led to faster development while maintaining consistent, usable design standards.
- Helped users adopt more efficient methods with the new designs providing flexible and fluid pathways and coordinated transitions among multiple tools and workspaces.
- Set the new UI to reduce clutter without reducing capability, ease the transition between primary and secondary information, and make necessary information more visually salient.
CX Expert | Ideation Workshop Facilitator
Koch Industries - Koch Global Solutions
- Organized, planned, and delivered an innovation and ideation workshop with Koch Senti to understand better and explore consumer, product, and market strategies for the Senti intelligent sensing technology.
- Contributed to this workshop that used the virtual whiteboarding Miro and post-presentations, helping to bring a collective understanding from multiple stakeholders to areas for further exploration and a future strategy for the business.
- Worked on this workshop that leveraged several vital questions to identify its customers, evaluate opportunities, and prioritize business focus.
Client Design Services and Strategy Lead | Design Director
Toptal LLC
- Grew design and customer experience services for Toptal to meet the needs of its clients with the top 3% of designers across the globe to accomplish the amazing.
- Worked with enterprises, SMBs, and startups across the globe to bring them the world's top design thinkers, innovators, UX researchers, and UX/UI designers (interaction, visual, and communications).
- Collaborated with revenue teams to grow accounts, which included creating design capability presentations and RFPs.
- Mentored talent and product teams on design best practices and processes.
- Consulted on internal initiatives to increase Toptal core services and revenue and improve its software.
Founder | Director
perBodhi Experience Design
- Founded a consultancy that delivered design, development, and marketing of digital services that leveraged HCI, research, design best practices and methodologies, and UX and UI to build value and reward for end users and businesses.
- Led the digital strategy for a retail store, designing, building, and leveraging analytics. Increased the eCommerce presence, engagements, and in-store visits by over 500%.
- Supplied full-lifecycle design practices to improve the customer experience across multiple clients. Conducted design thinking workshops leading to additional funding and innovative solutions, including qualitative user research, UX, and UI design.
- Designed, set up, and developed a WordPress site with eCommerce, CRM, and analytics integrations that enabled others to administer and update the site with ease.
- Identified and built analytics to grow businesses, increasing SEO and social media impact and achieving the top Google Search and Facebook rankings in the local community.
- Worked with startups to evolve their business model canvas through workshops, mentoring, UX research, UX design, and UI design, including creating MVPs and prototypes.
- Consulted on developing startup business models through audience research and rapid prototyping, including consulting with Ogopo.go to create a mobile app bringing offers and services from local lifestyle businesses to young people.
- Mentored and consulted with entrepreneurs, startups, and students in design thinking, UX, and UI design. This included leading an IoT community working group and running courses in prototyping and business model execution and processes.
- Led the online and offline coordination, creative direction, brand, and marketing for a 20,000-capacity festival, delivering web, mobile, and print assets while managing the build-up and event on the day.
Product Designer
TBTTS, Inc
- Used Axure to design and prototype the world's first blockchain ecosystem for fully compliant issuing, trading, clearing, and settling of tokenized securities.
- Led and guided the design process through paper concepts, rapid prototyping, and higher-fidelity designs to convey information architecture, visual design, and interaction.
- Managed the project and collaborated remotely across time zones with the client and key stakeholders to realize the system vision.
- Leveraged Axure, online collaboration, and Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat to convey various stages of the deliverables and final concepts.
Principal User Experience Consultant
Tobias & Tobias Consultancy
- Took responsibility for leading simultaneous projects while working closely with clients, stakeholders, and developers (often global) from the pitch to inception and execution.
- Facilitated a client’s product visions by researching, conceiving, wireframing, sketching, prototyping, and mocking up user experiences for digital products.
- Served as a subject matter expert and evangelist in meeting business, customer, and user needs.
- Collaborated and actively participated with multidisciplinary teams to deliver successful outcomes within tight deadlines.
- Led and worked hands-on to deliver desktop and mobile solutions for Deutsche Bank Autobahn, Fidelity UK Investments' investment app, and First Western Trains.
Senior Architect: User Experience
Finastra
- Led and worked hands-on with the global UX team to deliver usable, functional, and intuitive software applications of high complexity for the banking, treasury, trading, risk, and healthcare industries across desktop, web, mobile, and cloud.
- Led the design program for a white-label experience banking platform for Misys that consolidated legacy financial technologies into a new flexible, unified, and highly configurable experience platform.
- Designed the UI and interaction patterns for a cloud-based carbon emission certificate trading and compliance SaaS-based platform.
- Consulted on and assisted in designing an electronic health record (EHR) for Allscripts, working with the US design team to conduct qualitative research and create journey maps and design concepts.
- Program managed projects, including obtaining funding, conducting strategic requirements gathering, program planning, business case development, stakeholder engagement and leadership, vendor selection, definition management, and design management.
- Followed an iterative design process, progressively creating detailed designs and higher-fidelity prototypes through sketches, wireframes, and prototypes to refine the best design solutions.
- Led and mentored interdisciplinary, distributed teams with members in London, India, Manila, and the United States. Worked directly with clients, end-users, managers, and senior stakeholders for a worldwide distributed user population.
- Reduced operational costs and improved usability and brand value through a common user interface, interaction patterns, training, standards creation, implementations, and governance.
Head of Information Architecture and User Experience
Euromonitor International
- Increased business revenue streams, reduced operating costs, and improved brand awareness through research and user-centric redesign of Euromonitor's market research, business intelligence reports, and data on industry products.
- Developed business cases, elicited business, and did a usability analysis to determine the acquisition and implementation of a SaaS architecture.
- Translated ideas and prototypes into production-ready designs while understanding the high-level constraints of the user, technology, business, and brand.
- Rolled out new web products and features within this environment, improving the overall architecture, usability, and design for users while also improving internal processes, increasing productivity, and reducing overhead.
- Delivered collaboration, personalization, publishing, search, knowledge management, and other web 2.0 and 3.0 technologies to clients and businesses.
- Led workshops and conducted usability research to identify and document requirements.
- Spearheaded the development of Passport, which became Euromonitor's flagship product and won numerous awards in its market for content and usability.
Head of Information Architecture
Centrica
- Reduced operational costs and improved work practices and knowledge sharing to all group employees across the corporate center, British Gas, Centrica Energy, Direct Energy (USA), Automobile Association, One.Tel, and Dyno.
- Led the information architecture and taxonomy in designing, developing, and implementing the global intranet and extranet across various mediums and technological platforms, including desktops, laptops, mobile, and navigational systems.
- Improved knowledge-based sharing through improvements in the overall search and findability of information.
- Ensured that the intranet and related products complied with the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) for accessibility through forums, documentation, and user testing.
Lead Information Architect
Object One (Now Digitas)
- Worked on RFPs, met with clients and end users to gather requirements, and led research and UX activities for a range of clients, primarily within government services.
- Conducted end-user interviews at the start and end of delivering client solutions.
- Delivered task flows, information architecture, sitemaps, wireframes, user interface designs, and requirements for one of the UK’s best-regarded internet agencies.
- Pitched, won, and delivered information architecture and user experience design for the award-winning Stockton Borough Government Council site serving 180,000+ people and many personas.
- Delivered the UK government education standards website and the UK government drugs intranet.
Head of Design
LineOne (Now TalkTalk)
- Reported to the CEO while providing creative direction in visual and interaction design and managing resource allocation, hiring, budgets, and schedules.
- Increased click-through rates and commercial value through the redesigned LineOne and Tiscali websites.
- Designed the mobile presence and template-driven sign-up CD products.
Senior Designer and Web Master
Multiactive Software (Now Maximizer, Inc.)
- Joined the company to lead the design team right after completing my Vancouver Film School Multimedia Diploma. Delivered UX and UI designs for Concord Pacific and Dunn & Bradstreet.
- Led the design of the UX and UI of Canada's first MLS realty website with a team of designers.
- Led the architecture, user testing, interface design, prototyping, and XML/HTML coding of templates for the CRM and eCommerce software for web and desktop.
- Delivered the COMDEX award-winning ecBuilder while recruiting and managing a team of five designers.
- Designed a user- and action-based navigation system to funnel users based on their choices within a website that integrated with Maximizer CRM and ecBuilder eCommerce website builder.
Education
Diploma in New Media
Vancouver Film School - Vancouver, Canada
Diploma in Retail Management
Sainsbury's PLC Management Program - London, England
Bachelor of Arts Degree in Product Design
Ravensbourne College of Design and Communications - London, England
Skills
Tools
Axure RP Pro, Illustrator CC, UX Tools, Adobe CC, Microsoft OneNote, Prototyping on Paper (POP), Microsoft PowerPoint, Figma, InVision, UXPin, Visio, Dreamweaver 2018, InDesign CC, Microsoft Outlook, Sketch, 123D Design, Excel 2016, Flash, Slack, Adobe Experience Design (XD), Adobe, Google Analytics, Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, OmniGraffle, Microsoft Word, Pencil & Paper, Microsoft Excel, Asana, Google Workspace, Photoshop CC, Premiere Pro CC, Miro, Jira, Spreadsheets
Platforms
Mobile, WordPress, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Apple, Windows, Web, Microsoft, iOS, Android, Chrome OS, PC, MacOS, Axure, Apple Watch, Salesforce
Industry Expertise
Banking & Finance, Healthcare, Events, Retail & Wholesale, Marketing, Investments
Languages
HTML5, HTML, CSS4, CSS, XML, PHP, JavaScript
Other
Software Interfaces, Interactive Web Design, Interface Design, Interaction Design (IxD), Ideation, Inspiration, User Interface (UI), Device Interaction, Interactive UX, Interactive UI, Wireframing, Navigation, User Analysis, Analytics, Proposal Design, Task Flows, Task Analysis, Portals, Personalization, Consumer Banking, Mobile Banking, Online Banking, Commercial Banking, UX Flows, Ideation Workshops, User Journeys, User Journey Maps, User Paths, Customer Research, Usability Guidelines, Usability Engineering, Interviewing, Client Interviews, Customer Interviews, Stakeholder Interviews, Personas, Card Sorting, Use Cases, Field Studies, Usability Testing, Ease of Use, User Roles, Usability, Usability Heuristics, Web Usability, User Flows, Prototyping, UX Research, User Research, Rapid Prototyping, Design Leadership, UX Leadership, Design Research, Web Research, Low-fidelity Mockups, Information Architecture (IA), User Experience (UX), Story Mapping, Web Portals, Navigation Design, eCommerce UX, Agile UX, Design, Graphical User Interface (GUI), Visual Design, App UI, UX Strategy, IA Strategy, Digital Strategy, App Design, Desktop App Design, Android App Design, Web App Design, Responsive UX Design, Responsive UI, Accessibility, Complex Web Systems, Complex Application User Interfaces (UI), Dashboard Design, SaaS Design, WordPress Design, Mockups, UI Design, Mobile Mockups, UX Prototyping, High-fidelity Mockups, Sketching, PowerPoint Templates, Research, Financial Design, Interviews, eCommerce UI, Portal Design, UI Patterns, App UX, Lean UX, UX Analysis, Adobe UX, Needs Analysis, UX Design, Banking UI Design, Freelancing, Design Thinking, User-centered Design (UCD), Product Design, Discovery, Web Applications, Customer Experience, Visual Storytelling, Enterprise Design, Payment Gateways, Web App UX, Web App UI, Workshop Facilitation, UX Audits, Workshops, B2C, Responsive Web Design (RWD), Web Design, Agile Product Management, Product Management, Product Roadmaps, Product Strategy, Scrum, Finance, B2B, Data Visualization, User Personas, Intranets, Responsive Web Apps, Mobile Design, Social Networks, Employee Engagement, Component Libraries, Enterprise Application Design, Layout, Layout Design, WebApp, Productivity, User Testing, UI Components, User Validation Testing, Pitch Decks, Presentation Design, Content Writing, Journey Mapping, UX Wireframes, Design Systems, Annotated Wireframes, Style Guides, Feature Prioritization, User Stories, White Label Design, Admin Panels, Software as a Service (SaaS), Heuristic Analysis, Interactive Tools, Visual Identity, Private Banking, Case Studies, Touch Interactions, Field Research, Animated Interactions, Rich User Interfaces, Mega Navigation Design, Web Analytics, Content Management Systems (CMS), Mind Mapping, Fintech, Feasibility Studies, HTML UI, iPhone, Taxonomy, Customer Analysis, Pivot Tables, Internet of Things (IoT), Excel Reporting, 3D Print Design, 3D Printing, 3D Product Modeling, User Interviews, Observation, Storyboarding, Guerilla Usability Testing, Focus Groups, User Surveys, Benchmarking, Surveys, Mental Model, Remote Usability Testing, Unmoderated Remote Usability Testing, Ethnography, Benchmark Analysis, iOS Guides, User Needs, Mind Maps, WordPress eCommerce, Outlook, eCommerce, Logo Design, Nomenclature, Writing & Editing, PowerPoint Design, Mobile App Design, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), iOS App Design, Windows App Design, Complex Problem Solving, Complex Reasoning, Photography, Brand Identity, SaaS, JavaScript Libraries, Utilities, Big Data, 3D Design, Drupal Sites, Drupal Design, Technical Design, Menu Design, Audio, A/B Testing, Complex Data Analysis, Branding, Brand Development, UI Branding, UX Branding, Consumer Branding, Digital Branding, Dashboards, Web Dashboards, WordPress Themes, Quantitative Analysis, Hybrid Apps, Health IT, Empathy Mapping, Roadmaps, Digital Ecosystem Mapping, Copywriting, Mindjet, Adobe Acrobat Pro, Wikis, Agile, Plumtree, Nonprofits, Startups, Nightlife, Business Ideas, Apps, Lean Startups, Technical Forex Concepts, Financial UX, Forex Trading Room, Qualitative Research, Quantitative User Research, Patterns, Scrum Master, Service Design, Responsive, Loans & Lending, Corporate Finance, Social Media, UI Development, Investing, Leadership, Client Relations, Interface Testing, Interactive PDFs, VR Interfaces, AR Interfaces, Apple Pay, Icon Design, Liferay, Research Studies, Diary Studies, Office 365, Google, Presentations, Mobile UX, Mobile UI, Enterprise SaaS, Islamic Banking, Digital Banking, Healthcare Management Systems, Healthcare IT, Electronic Health Records (EHR), Market Research & Analysis, Business Intelligence (BI), Consumer Insights, Data, BI Reports, Reports, Infographics, Vendor Selection, Slideshows, Management Consulting, Best Practices in Design, Product Consultant, Consulting, UX Mentoring, Mentorship & Coaching, Innovative UX, UX Pattern Design, Customer Journeys, Design Patterns, Loans, Risk Management, Credit Risk, Management, Warehouses, Design Workshops, UX Workshops, High-fidelity Prototypes, Scientific Data Analysis, Data Modeling
Experience
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