Daniel Nieuwenhuizen

Working in the Merchant Marketing team, I help build tools and buyer experiences that drive store growth. Systems to publish ads in our first party app, Shop, as well as in second and third party platforms, and owned media — working with influencers. The main goal is increasing inventory, creating opportunities where the merchant only pays after reaching their goals and building an AI enabled system where our customers can succeed with the least amount of input.

As a the most senior member of the craft team, I'm also focused in raising the craft, mentoring junior designers, driving alignment between multiple products, delineating design vision and their initial milestones, as well as any opportunities for testing.

At Automattic, I shaped design across multiple products, the main one being WooCommerce, the world's largest open-source commerce platform. Leading 20 designers, I personally helped Improve the craft for the brand, site and online marketplace, core product, payments platform, mobile and point-of-sale solutions.

By prioritizing our strategic investments, I managed to get WooPayments growing again, reduce the churn of customers, and set the foundations to reinvigorate the core product by using a new design system for a more friendly UX, and hosted solutions to improve product performance.

With a mandate to elevate craft and coach, I ran two design critiques per week, and made a point to review all the work personally on Mondays, identifying the critical pieces of work that needed attention — for those I'd work hands on with a designer, both sharing feedback and coaching them on how to improve.

I advise the founder of MVPR for all design related queries. MVPR is the first PR platform for the AI era, merging human expertise together with artificial intelligence and data analytics to deliver sophisticated PR strategies. I've started working with them when they were a single idea on paper, all the way to the current, revenue driving stage.

Managing and coaching 8 reports directly and working in a multifecta (Product, engineering, data and UX) to define the strategy and plans for the Theme Design and Store Editor team. Our work covered B2B (helping merchants create and get their stores live) and then B2C (ensuring all our designs follow best-in-class commerce patterns).

My team's work for the themes was a design system that powers all new themes designed and delivered by Shopify since September 2021. This project 10x the speed to shipping, and allowed us to replace our old 10-year catalogue in 10 months, with 4x as much adoption as previous iterations.

While leading the team, I was also hands-on designing components and themes, and pairing with designers on a weekly basis to coach them, and stimulated the participation in Fresh Eyes — sessions where they could take their work to broader teams.

We used experimentation and research to mitigate risks, and cross-collaboration with other teams to unlock opportunities – such as revenue increasing opportunities, or engagement enabling features. The success of themes enabled a deeper reinvention of the no-code editor experience.

Working directly into VR/AR, I led the work for the core B2B focused operational system for the Magic Leap 2 device, a full revamp from Magic Leap 1. My responsibilities ranged from hands-on work such as establishing the art direction and design system, as well as appropriate tooling to improve the pipeline from Figma into Cinema4D and/or Unity, and mentoring other designers about spatial design principles via design critiques and 1:1 coaching sessions.

By using research to meet developers and understand the market, I was able to define core usability patterns and needs (such as toolkits) to enable easier development, as well as influence our core evaluation metrics, primary input mechanisms and core application needs — influencing the work on 1st party apps such as camera, settings, and browser.

Part of the work was to visualise how those ideas could be delivered as part of the cloud Metaverse initiative, and how it applied to B2B environments such as warehouses, factories and hospitals, driving team alignment towards our mission.

Started the London office, hiring designers and building partner relationships. Managing teams across both US Coasts, I helped shift Magic Leap's products to focus on the the enterprise and B2B market, designing desktop tools to support development, device and application management, ecommerce, app store on the web and systems for internationalization, such as type design for multiple regions, including Japan. As part of the project, my team built a well documented design system that helped us kick-off brand consistency across properties and channels.

To elevate the craft, I used async and synced design critiques, as well as set the direction by designing core screens and prototypes for key areas of the brand: site, ecommerce, app store on the web, retail and event experiences.

The work increased core metrics such as purchase, connection between 3rd party developers and enterprise companies and consequently growth of applications available for our B2B customers.

Led a team of UX and UI designers working across multiple segments of the Fintech industry, from product discovery through definition, research, build and iteration. Most of the clients were B2B, with some participating in the B2B2C market.

Core results include the design system for a SaaS Planning company, including data visualisation and management, as well as the future vision leading to their future IPO. Other products included moving mortgages to blockchain, setting up a block-equity trading product and scaling commodity trading inside a larger organization.

Collaborated with strategists, business transformation specialists and led design teams to deliver products and services. Among them a data visualisation for Google, and product strategy for Nextdoor, Babylon, The Eleven and Polaroid Swing – acquired by Microsoft. For all clients, I worked in small team units — which enabled me to be always hands-on, as well as drive fasterfeedback loops.

Worked with Connected Spaces, using tech to optimise the usage and flow of physical environments, redefined a health metric with Nike, delivered a playful education service for McDonald's and launched a suite of digital products in Turkey, including digital TV, Music, messaging and payments.

Also helped shape the visual language and design system of various digital products and services, including O2 Priority, the premier loyalty programme of the UK, and Beats Music – the music service that Apple acquired and turned into Music, as well as Getty Images' main website, location based services for Unilever and an Olympics' installation for Nike.

Worked with concept, user experience, product design and research – prototyping, iterating and testing on new ideas. The company's goal was to build a new media format to improve how information was scanned, summarized and visualized. It created custom computer generated multimedia presentations based on search queries. It won a Techcrunch Disrupt and was later acquired by Yahoo!