I believe in designing to influence positive change.

​I'm Vanessa, a digital product designer from Toronto, Canada. I’m currently in my final year of studies in Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Throughout my journey,​I've designed products and experiences at a range of companies, startups, and agencies across North America and Europe. As a designer with an engineering background,​ I've found ways to apply design methods to a variety of problem spaces and take ownership in various parts of the design process, from research to implementing designs.

Outside of school, you can also find me playing varsity tennis for UWaterloo, or fuelling my creativity through music, learning languages, and traveling!

Feel free to reach out at [email protected] and stay connected with me!

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Currently I'm ...

Writing about My Experience Abroad for 4 months in Berlin as a product design intern at Edenspiekermann design agency.

Growing the student design community ​at UWaterloo through UW/UX and writing about Getting into UX.

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Achievements

​1st Camp Figma Design Competition
by Figma Virtual Campus (Sep 2020)
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​Adobe Creative Jam Finalist
by Adobe and The Ocean Agency (Apr 2020)

1st. Best Hack Overall
by HackPrinceton (Nov 2019)

Top 5 Overall Finalist & Fan Favorite Project
by MakeHarvard (Feb 2019)

Top IBM Watson Visual Recognition API Hack
by IBM at UofTHacks (Apr 2019)

Athletic Academic Scholarship (Tennis)
​​by the University of Waterloo (2019)

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Professional Experience

​Product Design Intern, Palantir

May - Aug 2022 / New York, U.S.

Designed key features for embedding in-platform data widgets, charts, and objects to generate technical reports. Designed interactions for users to visualize, filter, and transform data through interactive dashboard workflows.

​Product Design Intern, Edenspiekermann

Aug - Dec 2021 / Berlin, Germany

Redesigned NZZ Magazine by establishing a new visual direction and iterating on editorial design components, for 1M weekly readers.
Designed and tested core features for AutoScout24, the largest European online car sales platform. 

​Product Designer, Friendly Studio

Jun - Aug 2021 / Remote

Designed an integrated virtual event scheduling and recruitement platform for Flo Recruit.
 Designed a ticketing dashboard system for LightyearAI, helping the company secure $13M in Series A funding. 

​Product Design Intern, Intuit

Jan - Apr 2021 / Toronto, Canada (Remote)

Led the design of a global notifications framework for the TurboTax design system by establishing key design treatment principles. Conducted usability testing to address pain points in the TurboTax.ca site usability and identified a key areas of focus.

​Product Design Intern, Outgive

May - Aug 2020 / Toronto, Canada

Redesigned a cross-platform web app for shipping management to improve information architecture and visual components. Implemented front-end web changes using Vue.js. Performed A/B testing using Google Analytics tools, increasing conversion rate by 32%. 

​Product Design Intern, FairVentures

Sep - Dec 2019 / Waterloo, Canada

Designed a data visualization application to analyze customer churn behaviour and conducted user research to discover pain points in the insurance booking process.

​UX Design Intern, Sun Life Financial

Jan - Apr 2019 / Waterloo, Canada

Redesigned the mobile customer authentication feature in the mySunLife mobile app to enhance UI components and streamline the authentication experience.