Cristina Tulcidas, Product Designer ❊

Crafting conscious experiences that help people. Previously helped startups launch SaaS B2C and B2B products across Web, iOS and Android apps, maintain Design System efforts and lead a small team of junior devs. As an advocate of cross-collaboration, I wrote an article about why devs and designers work better together at the beginning of my career that has reached +1k reads.

2024   🎤   Speaker

Tech teams from a designer’s pov

The key to building successful products in a team that thrives in doing so, is determined by the seamless cross-collaboration between designers and developers within well organised and structured management within tech teams.

Past event: 12 Jan
@GeekSessions

2023   💼   Work

Proposal to improve Flat.io’s out-dated interface

Proposed a new solution to improve the visual interface for Flat’s iOS and Android mobile experiences, which looked out-dated and was no longer efficient in driving product consistency with the most recent feature improvements, affecting user retention.

2023   💼   Work

Increased user-engagement (+20%) and instilled greater confidence for beginner and first time-users

Designed the end-to-end experience of the guided interactive onboarding tutorial in collaboration with the CxO manager, to simplify and drive better comprehension of the basics of inputting notes for musical notation composition.
2022   🎓   Education

Emotional Design & Design Psychology Workshop

A Workshop focused on the emotional psychology behind user experiences  such as the creation of content, websites, application and interactions, and the assessment of emotion, motivation, cognition and behaviour. Reinforcing the importance behind the psychology of visual perception and usability heuristics. The workshop’s approach to the topics is both theoretical and practical.

EDIT. Disruptive Digital Education

2021   🎓   Education

UX Design Foundations Course 

This certification delves into the exploration of the knowledge of UX fundamentals such as: User-centered Design, Business Goals, Persona Creation, Ideation, Architecture Information, User-flows, Usability Testing and other User Research quantitive and qualitive methods. Studying how to analyze different and potential user behaviours, helping to develop scenarios and workflows tasks, far beyond research, prototypes, wireframes and others. The students perform practical explorations on the topics mentioned and deliver a final project case-study.

EDIT. Disruptive Digital Education

2020   💼   Work

Participated in the product strategy definition and led the end-to-end design for AI Coaching’s digital health chatbot coaching solution

A ML health coach-bot mobile app, designed to help sales professionals further develop themselves through practical digital training and live coaching sessions.
2020   💼   Work

Designed an innovative user-centric solution for an improved performance on the search of digital certifications offered by DIHK’s 79 local Chambers of Commerce with an AI chatbot

Collaborated with a data-scientist and ML specialist, a full-stack software engineer and PM on the end-to-end design of an AI chatbot search interface solution to create a single source and unified platform for all nationwide and non-nationwide digital certifications offered by the German Chamber of Commerce (DIHK).

2019   🎤   Speaker

UX is smart. UX is kind. UX is emotion.

Introducing UX Design into the Tech industry of the Algarve region, which was still seen by many as a form of Art without rationale, rules and guidelines, delving into the world of UI and UX and creating a better understanding of how much more similar it is to engineering than art, with a focus on approaching the process that cross-collaboration and user empathy are at the heart of success. Just like fellow engineers, designers rely on guides, rules and process documentation.

Past event: 25 May
@Faro DEVDay by Turbine Kreuberg

2019   🎤   Speaker

Back to school

Back to school is a series of lectures from professionals of the Communication Design (BA) Degree, who return to the University to share their experience from transition between studies to the job market.

Past event: 22 Mar
@UAlg, University of Algarve

2018   💼   Work

Managed a small team of junior devs, and led the end-to-end design of an educational digital management platform MVP for professional educators in 3 months

An accelerating education vision-based platform database that focuses on enabling shared trainings for professional educators and lectures.
2018   🎤   Speaker

Why devs and designers work better together

Opening session for the first Geek Girls Portugal in the Faro region, delving into the success of cross-collaboration between design and engineering.

Past event: 25 May
@GeekGirlsPortugal

collaboration

Designer by qualification, human by choice ✱
What ties it together, is a love for learning and passion for understanding people and their stories ✿

I am inspired by growth and humanity, emotional intelligence, mental health and love. As a life-long learner and believer of inclusivity, diversity, equality and connection, I am always humbled by the wisdom and kindness of others.

Efficient communication and collaboration is imperative to productive and fulfilling relationships in a workplace. And Product Design is a team sport that requires collaborative, in-depth conversations with PMs, Engineers, Researchers, Marketing Strategists, CX and Stakeholders to help translate business into experiences.

People science is the practice of examining how people think, feel, behave and learn. It should be embedded into everything we do.

Here is what some of the people I’ve had the pleasure to collaborate with have to say about working with me.

Vanessa Nascimento
Co-founder at Local.Foundation

Team Lead at Evodeck Software and Local.Foundation

Cristina is a committed employee with a very high sense of responsibility. A team player, works well under structure leadership/project management and is able to recognise improvements from her side and to suggest fixers to team’ problems. Wish I had the chance of working together again and I would definitely recommend her.

Penélope Gonçalves
Tech & Team Lead at ContentServ and Co-founder at Local.Foundation

Event Organizer at Geek Sessions

Cristina sparks joy whenever she talks about product design and how it can be used to better everyone’s lives, and is a big inspiration for me, as a software engineer, on the importance of delivering the best possible products that not only will be good, but that will matter. We’ve collaborated in the past through Geek Sessions, and her sense of commitment to community is just as strong as her good practices and hard work.

Gustavo Jordão
Engineering Lead at Rydes

Team Collaborator  at Evodeck Software

To this day the best designer I’ve ever worked with. Every developer knows how painful it can be to work with designers. I’ve never had a single problem with Cristina as we worked closely together to figure out the best solutions for our users but also to our developers. 10/10 would work with again

Kelly Mestre
Full-stack Software Engineer at AI Coaching

Team Collaborator  at Evodeck Software and AI Coaching

I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with Cristina for a few years and since we parted ways to explore new challenges I really miss her as a really good professional that she is in a team. Cristina is a team player always open to discuss, brainstorm with her teammates. Her close connection and work with the development team makes everyones work flow very smoothly and very easily. Besides being a great communicator, in her work she is very well organised and perfectionist which makes her work very defined and reliable, even from the most important to the smallest details. I learned a lot with her, and also a word and a concept which I will never forget – consistency. These learnings have guided me throughout my professional career making me implement the best practices and giving me a better understanding on how important her work is to achieve a good product. I still hope that one day our paths will cross and we can work together again because good professionals like Cristina are really hard to find and there is no doubt that Cristina is a highly valuable member to have on the team.

Cristina Tulcidas — 024©