UX & Product Designer

Carmel Hassan > UX & Product Designer

My name is Carmel Hassan Montero and I studied Computer Engineering at the University of Granada. I started my career as a Web Developer in 2006. My interest in technology and human-computer interaction drives my professional path since then.

During my work experience, I’ve played the role of a programmer, designer, leader, teacher, people manager, and consultant. Whichever my role could be I enjoy always getting my hands dirty with real design stuff to get my brain active, exercise my hands, and empathize with people.

I’m based in Málaga (Spain), where I’m actively involved in tech communities like Yes We Tech, and support the organization of events that promote diversity and equality.

I enjoy my biking/walking commuting to the office as well as the flexibility of working remotely whenever I need to. Out of work, I simply enjoy biking on weekends, running on weekdays and hanging out with friends and family anytime.

Experience

01.03.2017
Product Designer / UX Lead
Ebury – 2 years and a half (nowadays) – I lead a small team of 3 designers who are involved in any people-facing product (Website, Communications, Online platform, and Backend System). My first challenge was to deal with design debt. Defining a design system as a strategy to refactor and provide consistency. I’ve run user interviews and tests and I work on the design of the information architecture and interaction.
01.02.2017
Teacher

Master Front-end Lemoncode – Editions I-VI – I find teaching a great knowledge experience. In this online master, I perform a 3-hour session to introduce key concepts about User Experience for developers. Every year I try to update examples with recent technologies and tools.

01.03.2015
Senior UX Specialist / UX Lead

ITRS – 2 years – I fell in love with Data working for this start-up company. I created the user interface concept of a real-time analytics platform after a deep analysis of competitors and industry standards. I discovered the power of quantitative user research analysing user interactions and followed an ‘eating-your-own-dog-food’ approach to visualise those metrics with the tool I helped to build, which inspired my article ‘Measuring UX with your own tools’.

01.01.2012
UX Lead Designer

CSC (Now DNX) – 2 years 9 months – The challenge was to create a common culture of User-Centred Design for a big corporation, so I started thinking about design in a more strategic manner, collaborating with Product Managers to get to the appropriate audience. I created a detailed reference for standards, guidelines, and UI Components for desktop and mobile apps so developers around the globe could build seamlessly healthcare applications.

06.09.2009
UI/UX Designer

iSOFT (a CSC Company) – 2 years 3 months – When I joined to iSOFT, I was a junior designer working as part of a team of developers and architect. I had to handle product requirements definition working with people in Australia, India, UK and Spain. Thanks to the success of a small proof of concept, the team grew, and I was promoted. I could hire 4 new designers and 2 more front-end developers. Together we created the first UI framework in XAML and .Net to build healthcare solutions.

01.01.2009
Web Designer

Freelance – 8 months – I started working as a freelancer to save as much money as possible and decide my own path of working so I could finish my master degree studies. During this time I built web-based products using Drupal. I’ve created themes from scratch, prototyping and defining the information architecture of websites, and setting up Drupal sites. I spent almost 20% of the time looking for new projects and speaking with customers, which taught me to appreciate the value of good management skills.

01.04.2007
Web developer

Grupo Trevenque Kaplan – 1 year 8 months – This was my very first serious job as an engineer, I won’t forget the vast amount of things I learnt from my colleagues. I was developing cool Drupal modules in PHP while I fell in love with CSS and HTML. Working surrounded by designers made me appreciate the value and power of well designed and developed web interface.

01.02.2006
Internship

University of Granada – 9 months – During my first job opportunity as an intern, I finish my degree in Computer Engineering. I worked as a Drupal developer and PHP programmer for different departments at the University. It was a good practice of some of the knowledge acquired during my studies.

Skills

Interaction DesignPassionate
PrototypingLove crafting concepts
User ResearchData is my secret weapon
Usability TestingGuerrilla as a habit
Visual DesignLess is always more
ProgrammingOnly when no real devs are around

Tools

  • Design: Invision, Sketch, Adobe XD, Axure RP, Proto.io, Balsamiq Mockups, UXPin.
  • Analytics: Mixpanel, Google Analytics, Data Studio, Fullstory, Inspectlet, Amplitude, MyOwnToolForTesting.
  • Others: Intercom, Segment, Big Query.

Languages

  • For humans: Spanish (native), English (advanced), French (ridicule), Arabic (hi, good morning, 1,2,3…)
  • For computers: HTML (classic), CSS3 (not good enough), Javascript (experimental), Python (primitive)

Education

College: University of Granada

  • UGR · Master Degree: Computer Engineering / 2010 / PFC · LCMS Platform based on Drupal
  • UGR · Degree: Systems Computer Technical Engineering / 2005

Certifications

  • Information Visualization: Getting Dashboard Rights (IDF) / 2019
  • Information Visualization (IDF) / 2019
  • Introduction to Data Analytics (Codeacademy) / 2018
  • R Programming (Coursera) / 2016

Other training

Volunteering

  • Organiser: Yes We Tech (since 2015). Feminist Tech community.
  • Collaborator: J On The Beach (2016,2017,2018). Tech Conference.
  • Volunteer: PyConES (2018). Tech Conference.
  • Web Developer: NOS (2008-2009). LGTB Non-profit organisation.

Events