About Me
Hello World, my name is Nick and I like to design! Over the course of 15+ year career, I’ve built my reputation as a Product Designer on three principles: hard work, efficiency, and continuous improvement.
My approach is simple: through relentless research, empathy, and the right combination of confidence and humility, I strive to solve complex problems with simple, elegant solutions. From ideation to implementation, I possess the expertise and determination to take a product from conception to deployment and beyond.
Recent Work
“I can’t say enough about Nick and his attention to client detail and their needs. He’s on time, personable, responsive, creative, and most importantly RELIABLE!”
“Nick joined my team as a visual designer and over the past three years has grown into a Senior Product Designer. Nick took multiple classes to learn new skills and worked on projects of growing complexity to hone his skills. He is now a very capable product designer that can handle all aspects of research/discovery and UX spec’ing for both web and app. He collaborates well with his teammates and has the willpower to continue to reach new heights.”
“I have known Nick Garcia in the business profession for over 14 years. I have enjoyed our time working together and getting to know Nick’s various skills in the business world. His knowledge and expertise in his profession put his skill set far ahead of his competitors. Along with Nick’s talent, he has always been a true team player and manages to bring the best out of other employees.”
“I had the pleasure of working with Nick on a number of complex projects. While in different departments, we worked in a highly collaborative manner. Nick efficiently implemented the design direction that I provided, with an attention to detail and nuance, while also questioning assumptions and providing alternative design concepts and strategies. With respect to productivity, Nick was cool-headed during stressful situations, and he always demonstrated professionalism and a solid work ethic to meet project deadlines.”
Resumé
NICK GARCIA
Oakland, CA | nick@nickgarcia.design
QUALIFICATIONS PROFILE
Highly creative and multitalented Product Designer with 10+ years of experience delivering web, mobile, and multimedia design solutions to dozens of clients and millions of end-users. Skilled in innovating new services and interaction design, collaborating across product management, engineering, and business stakeholders to create optimal UX/UI products. Adaptive and people-oriented, designing end-to-end processes that are creative, empathic, and driven by best practice user research. A passionate advocate of design thinking and pushing the envelope to deliver the best user experience. Areas of expertise and design…
SELECTED PROJECTS
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
NickGarcia.Design, Oakland, California
Freelance Product Designer, 2006 – Present
Innovated new services, connecting people through building products as an independent designer for over 13 years. Delivered sharp products with deliverables across functions such as UX/UI design, visual design, branding, digital marketing, and print.
Key achievements:
- Completed over 20 unique contracts across the entertainment, financial, and real estate industries.
- Orchestrated a site redesign and SEO implementation for lvs-amc.com, increasing web traffic by 92%.
CalMatters, Sacramento, California
Product Designer, December 2020 – July 2021
Lead the design process from research to hi-fi design and experiences. Run experiments using qualitative and quantitative data to validate hypotheses and guide design decisions. Work with editorial to define and explore ideas and apply audience perspectives to them. Interpret requirements and translate them into user-centric outputs that balance user goals, business needs, and technical specs. Provide actionable recommendations and obtain stakeholder buy-in. Develop and manage design systems and a brand style guide.
Key achievements:
- Drafted 80+ page UX/visual design audit of CalMatters website that included a competitive analysis of 19 comparative websites, survey of over 400 readers, 10 unmoderated user tests, journey mapping exercise with internal subject matter experts, and data synthesis of results.
- Created visual style guide and design system which simplified color and font usage and created visual consistency of assets for news articles, videos, data visualizations, and internal publications which saved at least 100 production man-hours per week.
Ingenio, LLC, San Francisco, California
Senior Product Designer, 2015 – 2020
Ideate, wireframe, research, produce, and prototype high quality web and mobile app products and features for Ingenio, an e-commerce knowledge exchange consultancy with ~$90M annual revenue, and its subsidiaries. Led collaboration with designers and cross-functionally among engineers, product managers, and stakeholders. Consistently generated ideas that connect people with the consumer product experience as the primary process driver. Using research to develop personas, user stories, and user journey maps with consumer product experience as the end goal, putting the user first by conducting best practice quantitative and qualitative research. Implement contextual inquiries, surveys, user interviews, preference testing, A/B testing, and usability testing.
Key achievements:
- Generated mobile app conversions of 57% on iOS and 35% on Android as result of home screen redesign.
- Oversaw development of three user personas and three psychic advisor personas for Keen.com, synthesizing data from over 120 user interviews and between 30 and 40 advisor interviews within a 6-month period.
- Restructured permission-restricted profile pages of Keen, reducing site errors by 92%.
- Spearheaded cross-functional collaborative in-house design as needed, leveraging visual design proficiency to create corporate branding for Ingenio’s marketing team.
IMVU Inc., Mountain View, California
Lead Web Designer, 2009 – 2015
Administered multiple design and user experience enhancements for IMVU, an online avatar-driven metaverse platform with 4M active users and a virtual goods catalog of 40M items in 2014. Marketing design lead for virtual product catalog and music store. Led UX/UI feature research and implementations for desktop client application, and navigated A/B testing for winning banner ads and additional marketing assets.
Key achievements:
- Awarded “Board Members Choice” recognition for redesign of Music Store platform, achieving a 12% increase in music sales.
- Supervised offshore employee design team, coordinating concurrent new projects and existing site upgrades to generate overall increase in IMVU’s marketing assets from 400 to over 1K per week.
L&A Marketing/Garden of E. Inc., Irvine, California
Senior Web Designer/Developer, 2007 – 2008
Designed and implemented five to seven marketing microsites per month as well as numerous landing pages in the interactive division of real estate marketing agency.
ADDITIONAL EXPERIENCE
Web Designer/Developer, CodeFire Studios, Inc., Costa Mesa, California
Web Designer/Developer, AuraGen Technologies, Inc., Costa Mesa, California
Web Designer/Developer, ComputerGiants.com, Inc., Irvine, California
EDUCATION/TRAINING
Coursework in User Experience Design, General Assembly, San Francisco, California
Coursework in Multimedia Design, Wolden Multimedia Institute, Anaheim, California
TECHNICAL PROFICIENCIES
SOFTWARE
Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, XD), Sketch, Invision, After Effects, HTML/CSS, Figma, Flash, iOS, Android
AREAS
User Experience (UX) Design, User Interface (UI) Design, Visual Design, Web/Mobile Platform Design, Branding, Rapid Prototyping, Information Architecture, User Research, Web Design, Web Development, Graphic Design, Design Theory, 2D Animation, Interaction Design, Prepress, Photo Editing, Video Editing
METHODS
Competitive Analysis, Contextual Inquiry, Affinity & Empathy Mapping, Survey, Personas & User Stories, User Flows, Sketching, Wireframing, Prototyping, Usability Testing, User Testing, A/B Testing, Statistical Analysis, Style Guides & Design, Systems
Let’s Connect
I’d to work with you.
I’m available for freelance work and I’d love to hear about your project. Send me your info below or contact me here.