Product Designer currently working remotely from Cape Town, South Africa
🔗 Website carlin.digital
👋 Socials Dribbble | Behance | LinkedIn
💬 Available on WhatsApp or drop me a mail
I have over 9 years of experience designing end-to-end experiences for business and consumer products for agencies, startups and entrepreneurs.
Currently available for freelance and contract based projects.
Selected Projects
**Pepperplane, UX Lead**
Contract | Feb 2025 - Currently
- Run discovery efforts with clients, including workshops to surface needs, pain points, and opportunities
- Defined UX strategy through problem statements, journey maps, and framing of design challenges
- Facilitated ideation sessions and collaborative design activities to generate and evaluate solutions
**AirDosh, Product Designer**
Contract | May 2024 - Currently
- Improve and drive product strategy by partnering closely with the founders
- Apply a product-led growth motion to the current sales-led growth model
- Leading and facilitating continuous product discovery efforts, including customer research, to deliver novel and innovative customer experiences
- Own the end-to-end user experiences across consumer and enterprise products
- Setting-up and maintaining design operations for a quick-to-market development approach
**Airkey, UX/UI Designer**
IO Digital | February 2024 (3 weeks)
- Designed a native Android app that operates within a suite of IoT devices that control Airkey locks over Bluetooth, NFC, or via pass signals over GSM networks
- Worked with the founder, project manager, and lead engineer to develop potential use cases and user stories, creating a ship-to-learn solution within a short time frame
- Worked closely with engineering to use the abilities of NFC, OTA, and Bluetooth technologies to ideate and design desirable features
Hop Wifi, Product Designer
IO Digital | February 2022 - May 2024
- Worked closely with entrepreneurs, developers and project managers to ship an end-to-end experience for a user base that grew to over 113 000 users
- Led the redesign and shipping of the content feed which saw the user engagement rate grow with 33%
- Facilitated and ran regular user research and usability testing to inform an iterative design approach
**ArtMeets, Product Designer**
Freelance | April 2023 - January 2024
- Conducted an extensive UX and UI audit of the existing app, leading to a comprehensive redesign
- Iterated on existing and new features to improve users' experiences such as sharing projects, building networks, peer-to-peer communications, facilitating informal trade, and more
- Facilitated and ran customer research and usability testing including overseeing a black boxed beta launch
Serve, UX/UI Designer
IO Digital | May 2021 - August 2022
- Led the end-to-end product design of Serve through a couple of product pivots, including a QR code-based order and payment solution for restaurants and a 24-hour home delivery service for essential goods
- Optimised a consumer goods marketplace designed for speedy checkout and upselling of products and live delivery tracking
- Designed and helped ship a sophisticated stock and order management system for merchants that included various payment integrations and staff management features
Hotshot, UX/UI Designer
IO Digital | August 2020 - December 2021
- End-to-end ideation, development, testing, and shipping of features for a highly-technical authentication, authorisation and accounting (AAA) platform to enable and manage access networks and technologies for over 351 properties, and more than 250 000 end users
- Created an innovate B2B2C ‘portal builder’ feature that allow internet service providers to build and deploy custom Wi-Fi network login pages for their clients in the hospitality sector
- Ran moderated usability tests with a prototype and presented findings to key stakeholders for buy-in on iterations
Pay Just Now, UI Designer and Visual Designer
IO Digital | February 2019 - November 2019
- Led the visual design, branding and UI design for a new-to-market zero-interest payment solution including creating a comprehensive brand guide to inform future digital and marketing touch-points
- Worked closely with a UX Specialist to design a consumer-facing web app. We developed innovative design patterns to encourage and facilitate timely payments of zero-interest instalments
- Rolled out the visual design direction to pitch decks, investor material, the website, and other collateral
Various Projects, Visual Designer
IO Digital | February 2017 - February 2019
- Created brand identities, illustrations, icons and animations for various digital touch-points and collateral like pitch decks
- Worked closely with a Creative Director to conceptualise brand and product concepts including user interface design
Education
Bachelor of Arts (Communication Design)
Cape Town Creative Academy | 2014 - 2016
Final year subjects:
- Communication Design (Major)
- Interaction Design (Minor)
- Illustration (Minor)
- Motion Design (Minor)
- Business Studies (Elective)
Certifications and Memberships
The Interaction Design Foundation
Membership | Credential ID 71871
Used by IBM, Adobe, and Philips, among others, to train their teams - IDF is a well-recognised resource for User Experience Designers, backed by the most authoritative UX community in the world, including Don Norman and Clayton Christensen.
Courses I have taken include:
- Design Thinking
- Human-Computer Interaction
- UI Design Patterns for Successful Software
- Psychology of Interaction Design
- UX Management: Strategy and Tactics
Reforge
Membership | Since October 2024
Led by the worlds foremost experts on shipping digital product - a Reforge gives it’s members access to a content library with courses, templates, case studies and more
Courses I have taken include:
Skills
Product Design
Ideation and discovery · User experience design · Systems thinking · UX auditing · Heuristic evaluation · User interface design · Rapid prototyping · Visual design · UX writing
Research
User interviews · Moderated and semi-moderated user testing · Quantitative analysis · Thematic analysis
Soft
Close collaboration in cross-functional teams · Creating buy-in around new design directions and product pivots · Advocating for the needs and pain-points of users in product teams · Encouraging and facilitating the implementation of well designed software that caters to user needs and desires · Owns end-to-end product experiences from idea to execution
Other
Workshop facilitation · Product documentation · Gherkin feature scenarios · Agile methodology · Product positioning · Sales pitch narrative and design
Tools
Figma · Adobe Suite · Cucumber Studio · Jira · Confluence · ClickUp · Framer · Miro · ProtoPie · Google Analytics · Dovetail · Hotjar