Hello!

Olá!
¡Hola!

I'm Luiz Santana


A UX/UI Designer and Product Owner based in Calgary, Canada. I'm originally from Brasilia, Brazil, and I always say how amazing my city's design and architecture is. I'm currently working as a UX/UI Designer at RBC.

As a taurine, I'm naturally driven by my passions: samba, coffee and creative ideas.

UX/UI Designer
Product owner
content creator
marketing strategist
agile enthusiast

My career

Nowadays, I like to say that I am a problem solver, above any position, title or job description. I think this is one of the designer's major attributions: to understand people's mishaps and propose solutions that, besides being creative, will be effective.

I also like to say that, unlike most UXers, I didn't start my career as a graphic designer or in an advertising agency. My career path started as a BI, analyzing numbers, behaviours, understanding the reasons for positive and negative performances. My first school was Ambev, the largest brewery in the world and owner of brands like Budweiser, Corona and Stella Artois. There, I began to understand the problems, dilemmas, and needs of users and end-users, internal and external clients. I learned to lead and deal with people, forming empathy and learning to listen better.

Then, I started working with project management at SOFTEX, and worked directly with important government projects in my country. Start-Up Brasil, Brasil IT+, and many other innovation and internationalization initiatives. From there, I began to see the importance of agile methodologies, and how this makes a difference in teams and when it is time to collaborate.

My third school was Caixa Seguradora, which is part of Caixa Econômica Federal, the largest bank in Brazil, and CNP Assurance, one of the largest insurance companies in the world. In this inspiring company, I exhaled digital marketing, project management, customer service and agile. But most importantly, I got to work with UX and design system initiatives. I launched products, campaigns, services, dealt with several advertising agencies, worked with diverse teams and had a lot of fun. I fell deeply in love with the discipline of user experience and met the woman of my life - lucky me!

Then I decided to have a life experience I had always dreamed of: studying outside my country. I chose Calgary as my home, embraced the cold and went to studies again. I accomplished two post-graduation with high scores at Bow Valley College and Mount Royal University. I learned to code, started to illustrate almost every day, won a few hackathons and started doing small jobs for local clients - often friends.

When I am not working on solving problems or bringing products to life, I am outdoors with my two border collies, playing video games with my son, and hiking in the Rocky Mountains with my wife.

Did you like my story and think I can add a lot to your project? Just shoot me a message →

Experience

Degrees and Certificates

Skills

As a former BI and big fan of numbers, before I get down to business I like to understand data and information about the project. Analyzing website metrics, customer portfolio profile, and even browsing behaviour; understanding UX and Marketing KPIs is essential.

I also want to understand more about the user, collecting perceptions and insights with researches and interviews. This empathy phase is key for me to evaluate pain points, needs and goals. Most importantly, it helps to avoiding assumptions and finding what the problem really is.

From there, the ideation and design steps may vary. Depending on the project, the fidelity of the wireframe might be higher or lower, yet, sketches, pen and paper are a mandatory process. I'm always reaching out to my collaborators to check for suggestions, feedback or guidance. Feedback is a constant in the UX process and should always be a must!

It-factor
I am driven by my passions, and being creative is one of them. I believe in the power of corporate cultures, in the ability of teams to accomplish outstanding feats. I'm always excited to get involved in the processes, to make a difference. Through time, I've developed an ownership spirit that makes me want to learn more regardless of the product and industry. I confess to loving design, web development and agile a lot, and I believe in and apply Design Thinking and other creative processes like Design Sprint and Lean UX. I thrive on being an integral part of the user experience; from the research to wireframe, brainstorming to testing.

Tools
Well-versed in several design platforms like Adobe XD, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop and Figma. I also have knowledge of front-end development, such as HTML and CSS, WordPress, Shopify and Webflow.

Languages

As a good citizen of the globalized world, I was born and raised in Brazil, and for the last two years, I've been living in Canada - west coast, in Alberta. I was also lucky enough to have Spanish relatives, which helped me in speaking a third language. I have had some other language adventures since discovering about cultures is exciting!

Get in touch!

Send me a message, I'll get back to you soon.

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