About me

A few notes on the things I build and the things that build me

Hi, I'm María, a Senior Product Designer based in Barcelona with extensive remote work experience and open to remote opportunities. I specialize in transforming complex ideas into clear and efficient user experiences, focusing on B2B SaaS products (Fintech, Mobility, and Sales Productivity).

For the past seven years, I have served as the lead designer at several early-stage startups, collaborating directly with founders, product teams, and engineers to develop solutions from concept to launch. This experience has taught me to lead UX strategy in agile environments, making pragmatic decisions that balance user needs, business goals, and technical constraints.

I place usability and accessibility at the center of my process, convinced they are the foundation of any successful user experience. Building on this, I specialize in creating scalable solutions, actively working on component architecture and designing and constructing Design Systems to ensure consistency and efficiency between design and development.

Staying curious and current is part of my DNA—whether it’s researching the latest in design, usability, and tools, attending workshops and conferences, or hosting events. Most recently, I organized the 2024 WIAD (World Information Architecture Day) in Barcelona, gathering 80 attendees and 7 inspiring speakers for a day of community and learning.

When I’m not designing, you’ll probably find me belting out classic rock tunes (yep, I’ve been training at a Rock Academy for 12 years), deep into a book, discovering new flavors in the kitchen, or enjoying a long dinner with friends.

If you need an autonomous and collaborative product designer who knows how to bring order and structure to ambiguity and has a strong systems-thinking mindset, let's talk about your team's next challenges and how I can help.

Certifications

How To Measure UX and Design Impact

Workshop by Vitaly Friedman Smashing Conferences!
 

November, December 2024
Full workshop, delivered in 4×2.5h + Q&A
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👉Track the impact of your design effort
👉Use the Top Tasks methodology to understand and prioritize user’s tasks
👉How to build a design KPI tree for each team and for each department
👉Translate them into clear goals for each team/department
👉How to make sense of SUS, UMUX, UMUX-Lite, SPRQ, North Star Metric, NPS, CLV, CSAT, CES, MAU, MRR/ARR and business KPIss.

Advanced Design Systems.

A Brad Frost's online workshop at Smashing Conference

November 2024
Full workshop, delivered in five 2-hour long sessions.
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👉 How to architect a design system ecosystem that’s tuned to your organization’s specific needs and goals.
👉 Governing design system recipes.
👉 Creating and managing multi-brand and multi-product design systems.
👉 Advanced design token architecture, naming conventions, process, and best practices.
👉 Component API design naming conventions, processes, and best practices for Figma and code.
👉 UI component construction and composability best practices for Figma and code.
👉 Best practices for design system team structure, roles, and position within your organization.
👉 Best practices for governance, contribution, and release processes.
👉 Communication and relationship best practices to ensure the long-term health of the design system and the digital products it serves.

Creating and Maintaining Successful Design Systems.

A Brad Frost's online workshop at Smashing Conference

November 2021
Full workshop, delivered in five 2-hour long sessions.
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👉 Selling Design Systems
👉 A Pattern-Based Process
👉 Atomic Design Principles
👉 Creating a rock-solid component library
👉 Anatomy of Effective Reference Website
👉 Design System Maintenance

Practical Accessibility Today

Online workshop taugh by Sara Soueidan

May - November 2023

Practical Accessibility is a self-paced, get-right-down-to-it video course designed to demystify web accessibility and equip you with the knowledge you need to confidently create more accessible websites and web applications today.

👉 Process for building accessible components from scratch?
👉 Semantic HTML
👉 Accessibility tree
👉 ARIA
👉 WCAG 
…and many, many more

Design Sprint Masterclass Certificate

AJ&Smart. Jake Knapp, Jonathan Courtney 

4 December 2020

The Design Sprint is a four-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. Developed at GV, it’s a “greatest hits” of business strategy, innovation, behavior science, design thinking, and more—packaged into a battle-tested process that any team can use.

The core principles of the Design Sprint are:
👉 Working Together Alone (removing personal biases and levelling the playing field)
👉 Tangible (ideas) over Discussion
👉 Getting Started over Being Right
👉 Don't rely on creativity

María Rey. Based in Barcelona, working remotely.