About Maria

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Born in sunny Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and now living in rainy Cambridge, UK. My pre-settled status allows me to work in the UK without requiring a visa sponsor.

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I'm interested in AI, Education and empowering people. Design can be a powerful force for social change, and I'm committed to promoting more diverse and community-centred design practices in my role.

Experience

MathWorks, UX Researcher

Jan 22 - Present

Cambridge, UK

Working on Simulink, I support engineers in transforming their models into code for their target hardwares - think planes, cars, and all sorts of cool tech. Activities include workflow mapping, user interviews, user testing, navigation tests, surveys, AB testing, and PURE analysis.

I'm also active in the UX Department, working on different initiatives to improve our design processes. I designed and created the first ever onboarding experience for MATLAB, helping students from all over the world to take their first step into programming.

Bottletop, UX Specialist

Part-time

Feb 21 - Dec 21

Remote, UK

Designed and develop the website of #TOGETHERBAND. I worked creating prototypes for the website and implementing the pages with HTML+CSS. I was the team's first UX, bringing practices to the company, such as usability heuristics and AB testing.

IBM, UX Designer

Aug 2018 - July 2020

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Worked on different consultancy projects and industries as a UX Designer. Facilitated multiple workshops and Design Thinking Sessions for our customers. Built prototypes and wireframes for IBM's internal projects and conducted usability test sessions to assess our solutions. Designed workflows and led UX for the innovation team of chatbot from the largest telecommunication company in Brazil, Oi.

At Oi, we helped the company save 20MM with customer support!

Apple Developer Academy, UX Designer

Nov 2014 - July 2016

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

During my BSc, I worked in Apple’s lab. I developed several apps from scratch, applying concepts of UX research to find and build the most relevant solutions for our users.

I worked with wireframes and prototypes before coding the applications in Swift, also creating their business models. I published three apps, one of which had over 2k downloads.

Education

MA in User Experience Design (Distinction)

@ LCC, University of the Arts London, UK

Graduated in 2021

BSc in Computer Engineering

@ PUC-Rio, Brazil

Graduated in 2019

Very happy @ WWDC

1st place @ AngelHack

Talk @ IBM’s RTE

Achievements

Won the Da Vinci Award for best design during the 2024 MathWorks Innovation day.
Received the excellence award for the project Joice, Oi's chatbot.
Speaker at the 2019 Regional Technical Exchange, IBM’s conference, delivering a talk about UX Design in Digital Transformation.
Lyft’s scholarship winner to study Udacity’s nanodegree in Intro to Self Driving Cars, in 2018.
WWDC 2016 scholarship winner, offered by Apple Inc, to attend the 2016 developers conference held in San Francisco, California.
1st place at AngelHack Rio de Janeiro 2016, a worldwide hackathon, with a project for women’s security.

My current hobbies

Knitting

Playing

Reading

Let's chat

If you want to talk about design or the meaning of life, feel free to connect!

I'm always open to new projects.