Aurel NakamuraResume

Product Designer · Design Systems

Aurel Nakamura

Seeking a senior design role on a systems or platform team

I design the unglamorous interfaces people use all day — scheduling boards, claims queues, admin consoles — and the component systems that keep them coherent. Nine years across logistics, healthcare operations and developer tooling, usually as the first designer embedded with engineers. I like ambiguous problems, written specs, and shipping the smaller version first.

Status
Open to new roles
Based
Lisbon · remote-first
Focus
Complex workflow UI
Email
aurel.nakamura@grainmail.example

01 — Selected work

Selected work

Three projects that best show how I frame a problem and what changed after.

  • Dispatch board rebuild

    01

    Freight platform · lead designer with four engineers · 7 months

    • Shadowed dispatchers for two weeks and found the real work happening in a spreadsheet beside our product, not inside it.
    • Redesigned the board around a single assignment gesture, with keyboard parity for power users and an undo path for every action.
    • Support tickets about "lost" loads stopped appearing in the weekly triage, and the spreadsheet workaround was retired by the pilot team.
    • Research
    • Interaction
    • Keyboard UX
    • Prototyping

  • Meridian design system

    02

    Healthcare operations suite · systems lead · ongoing for 2 years

    • Audited four product surfaces that had drifted into three button styles and two type scales, then agreed a shared set with the engineering leads before drawing anything.
    • Shipped tokens, 34 components and contribution docs, each paired with accessibility notes and a written "when not to use this".
    • New feature teams now start from the system by default, and design review time moved from spacing debates to product questions.
    • Design systems
    • Tokens
    • Documentation
    • Accessibility

  • Onboarding for a developer CLI

    03

    Internal tooling group · sole designer · 3 months

    • Treated terminal output as an interface: rewrote first-run messaging, error states and the install path as a single narrative.
    • Built a small documentation layout that matched the CLI's vocabulary word for word, removing the translation step between docs and tool.
    • First-week questions in the team channel shifted from "how do I start" to feature requests.
    • Content design
    • Developer UX
    • Docs

02 — Experience

Experience

Nine years, mostly small teams inside larger operations businesses.

  • Senior Product Designer, Meridian Health OperationsDesign systems and platform surfaces

    2023 — Present
    • Own the shared design system across four products and mentor two designers contributing to it.
    • Partner with a front-end guild to keep component behaviour identical in design and code, including focus order and reduced-motion handling.
    • Run a fortnightly critique that produces written decisions rather than opinions.

  • Product Designer, Kestrel FreightDispatch, tracking and carrier tooling

    2020 — 2023
    • Led the dispatch board rebuild end to end, from field research to release notes.
    • Introduced a lightweight research cadence — four operator calls a month — that the product team still runs.
    • Designed the carrier-facing mobile views under poor-connectivity constraints.

  • Product Designer, Bellwether StudioClient work for logistics and public-sector teams

    2018 — 2020
    • Delivered discovery and interface work on seven client engagements, typically as the only designer.
    • Built the studio's accessibility checklist and trained the team on using it during handover.

  • Junior Designer, Corvid InteractiveMarketing sites and early product work

    2017 — 2018
    • Produced layouts, front-end HTML and CSS, and learned to argue for less.

03 — Capabilities

Capabilities

Grouped by how the work actually gets done, not by tool logos.

Practice

  • Problem framing and scoping
  • Contextual research and operator interviews
  • Usability testing on live builds
  • Information architecture

Craft

  • Design systems, tokens and theming
  • Complex tables, filters and bulk actions
  • Interaction and state design
  • WCAG 2.2 AA, keyboard and screen-reader flows

Build

  • Figma, variables and component libraries
  • Working HTML, CSS and enough JavaScript to prototype
  • Reading React components to check implementation
  • Git-based design documentation

Collaboration

  • Written specs and decision records
  • Facilitation and critique
  • Mentoring mid-level designers
  • Working languages: English, Japanese, Portuguese

04 — Education

Education & training

Formal background, plus the training that changed how I work.

  • BA, Interaction Design

    Northgate University. Final project on scheduling interfaces for shift workers.

    2013 — 2017

  • Accessible Interface Practice — certificate course

    Twelve-week practitioner programme covering assistive technology testing, WCAG conformance and remediation planning.

    2022

05 — Contact

Get in touch

Happy to talk through any of the work above in detail.

I am most useful to teams with a genuinely complicated product and a small design group — somewhere a system needs building or rescuing. Portfolio case studies and references are available on request.

Email
aurel.nakamura@grainmail.example
Location
Lisbon, Portugal — remote or hybrid across European hours
Availability
Four weeks' notice