DON FANELLI
UX Designer
UX Designer with a bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering and over 10 years of experience in education and entertainment. An adaptable team-player skilled at mixed method research, dynamic storytelling and creative sprints.
EXPERIENCE
UX Writer Co-lead
Tech Fleet | Philly Truce Phase 1 | Remote
Led a team of 5 UX Writers for Phase 1 and met with founders, key stakeholders and project managers to solidify goals, deliverables and a project roadmap.
Spearheaded the creation of microcopy for SMS text interactions and automated responses by taking a trauma-informed approach, emphasizing de-escalation strategies and empathetic mediator communication.
Organized weekly creative team sprints in Figjam, which helped produce a comprehensive content analysis of 8 competitors and a functional Voice and Tone guide for ongoing content decisions.
Aided the Research team with competitive analysis, persona creations, and interview question development and had over 90% of content notes accepted by Design for their 30+ page final prototype.
Fostered cross-collaboration with research, design, engineering and key stakeholders, ensuring alignment of project goals and deliverables, presented project updates at weekly all-hands meetings, and delivered a final presentation to the Philly Truce founders, highlighting phase accomplishments and future recommendations.
Developed a comprehensive hand-off document organizing links, progress, roadblocks and recommendations for the seamless transition to Phase 2 and contributed to an all-hands retrospective in Miro.
Lead UX Researcher
October 2023 - Present
September 2023 - October 2023
UX Collective | Remote
Currently leading a team of 3 researchers providing primary and secondary research for the development of a Parkinson's Disease tracking app.
Collaborating with Project Lead on schedule and deadlines and synthesizing data from his previous collegiate research, roadmap, and outlines to provide the research team with pertinent information.
Leading efforts to design proto-personas, recruitment plans, surveys, interview protocol and questions, and organizing recruitment sources.
Cross-collaborating with designers to offer suggestions on moodboards and key features and present research findings and problem statements.
Product Designer
December 2022 – March 2023
Upright Citizens Brigade, LLC | Los Angeles, CA
Optimized the information architecture of UCB’s corporate services division and led a team to help redesign the corporate workshop program increasing offerings and customizations by 200%.
Facilitated stakeholder meetings with the CEO to initiate the research phase, ensuring alignment and a shared understanding of objectives.
Performed in-depth competitive analysis and conducted over 10 interviews with past employees and clients, gaining invaluable insights into pain points and user needs, which were strategically incorporated into the new program.
Delivered a comprehensive 35-page report ahead of schedule, presenting recommendations to the CEO that resulted in an immediate request for further insights across other company verticals.
UX/UI Designer + Researcher
November 2022 – January 2023
Waterworks Aquatics | Pasadena, CA
Recruited 10+ participants on social media to share pain points through a forum and conducted 3 insightful interviews, gaining a clearer understanding of user needs, empowering design solutions that resonated with their desires.
Streamlined task flow by 50%, by using research data to optimize the registration and class purchase pages of Waterwork’s responsive website and dashboard.
Updated the UI through a comprehensive redesign of icons, typography, color schemes, and logo, resulting in a more seamless user experience that enhanced navigation, readability, and overall usability.
User Experience Designer + Researcher
June 2022 – November 2022
CareerFoundry | Remote
Utilized competitive analysis, conducted content audits, and applied heuristic evaluation techniques to develop a user friendly application that seamlessly connects home cooks with expert cooking tutors.
Successfully recruited a diverse pool of over 60 user research participants through social media who actively engaged in a 15-question survey, yielding valuable insights on their cooking preferences, guiding key features.
Conducted six insightful qualitative interviews and ran a 10 person card sorting session, obtaining valuable user perspectives, which enabled sound architecture and the creation of user personas, journeys, and task flows.
Developed a rapid prototype crafted from mid-fidelity wireframes, conducted six remote usability tests and used affinity mapping and a rainbow spreadsheet to help improve writing and page redundancies.
Leveraged results from 24 A/B tests of splash and onboarding pages and a comprehensive accessibility evaluation to help finalize an interactive, hi-fidelity prototype in Figma.
Actor / Writer / Instructor
March 2010 – June 2022
Various Productions | New York + Los Angeles
Acted in over 60 television and movie productions. Written various screenplays, sketches, and ad copy. Performed in hundreds of critically acclaimed and award winning improv and sketch shows. Taught over 100 sold-out improvisational classes and workshops.
Facilitated dynamic workshops for industry-leading companies like Google, Facebook, and Anheuser-Busch resulting in improved team-building, active listening, and effective communication strategies.
Conducted over 150 one-on-one interviews for award winning podcast, The Need to Fail, inspiring creatives and non-creatives alike to push past their setbacks, generating an average of 15,000 monthly listeners.
Engaged in over 10,000 hours of creative collaboration, fueling innovation both on and off screen which resulted in such achievements as the production of an award winning short film, featured shows in the New York Times, and an invitation to the prestigious Just for Laughs Festival in Montreal.
Successfully sold an original screenplay to Nickelodeon, efficiently iterating on executive stakeholder feedback and delivering the final draft ahead of schedule.
don@donfanelli
Los Angeles, CA
Skills
Research
Qualitative Research
Quantitative Research
User Interviews
Competitive Analysis
Surveys
Card Sorting
Usability Testing
Affinity Mapping
A/B Testing
Design
Storyboarding
User Personas
User Journeys
User Flows
Wireframing
Prototyping
Tools
Figma
FigJam
Notion
Sketch
Adobe XD
Miro
Optimal Workshop
Google Forms
Slack
Education
Lehigh University
Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering
CareerFoundry
UX Immersion + UI Specialization