Who stands behind User Wizard?

User Wizard leverages a community of experts, UX leads, and senior professionals to empower Junior UX-lers in building the future of our industry. Together, we provide the foundation you need for success.

I was lucky enough to find a mentor who gave me the confidence to follow my vocation.

Marie-Aude Ramos

UX Researcher and Founder of User Wizard

As a career transitioner, I know the struggle of carving your own path in a UX career. It takes dedication and a fair amount of courage to follow a dream, but it also takes the right connections and learning the unwritten rules of the market.

I was lucky enough to find the right person on my path, a leader and a mentor, who gave me the confidence me to follow my vocation.

This program is my contribution to the UX community and the culmination of my own journey, as a career transitioner and a passionate UX-ler. It is also a fabulous human adventure,  initiated and supported by spirited professionals, who dedicate part of their time to growing the UX community and helping career transitioners in finding their path to UX.

 

Before you start

Have we been introduced?

Before you get in touch with your mentor, there is one more step to take: we’d like to get to know each other and define your mentoring goals. Our mentoring program relies on matching mentors and mentees to get the best potential outcome.

In a 30-minute chat, we’d like to learn more about you and present you the way we work. Is it a match? We’ll be more than happy to kickstart this journey with you. If not, you are still welcome to join our free events and get to know our community.

Our mentors

Ghizlane Arifine

Ghizlane Arifine

CX-Expert & founder of Xperience Metrics Consulting

Ghizlane is a founder of Xperience Metrics, offering consulting services to companies in customer experience management. She brings a wealth of expertise to the field of CX and UX research, encompassing both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, with over 12 years of dedicated engagement with global organizations (Siemens, Sonova, Swiss Market Place Group).

Ghizlane is a career transitioner from an academic researcher to a CX professional, she mentors scholars (PhD graduate, postgraduate and students), who want to leave academia towards corporate CX/UX research, guiding them through all the steps from the defining career vision and objectives, leveraging transferable skills to corporate, to crafting applications to land your first CX/UX corporate role.

Susanne Schmidt-Rauch

Susanne Schmidt-Rauch

Sr. UX-Researcher, Lecturer, Consultant and Co-founder of evux

As co-founder and partner of evux AG, a consulting firm in Zurich that puts user experience at the center of its daily work, “Sanne” has been working in the environment of digital products, channels and touchpoints for more than 10 years, helping companies to improve their human-computer interactions in any form.

Sannes specialties are UX methodologies and user research methods, strategic prioritization, workshop facilitation and consulting.

She gives talks in both scientific and practical contexts and she loves to teach from the heart.

Meltem Naz Kaso Coskun

Meltem Naz Kaso Coskun

UX Research Manager

 

Meltem is Istanbulite by birth and a Spanish national by choice. Her passion is building and maintaining high-performing UX Research teams. She aligns with her team and her collaborators on what success looks like, and walks backward from that vision to where they are today to help influence decision-making with user insights. Besides, she’s a non-alcoholic beer lover.

As a mentor and tutor for the User Wizard Academy, Meltem helps newcomers to UX grow their UX Research and UX strategy skills, and develop strong public speaking skills. Moreover, her mentees benefit from her hiring experience and learn how to optimise their application for specific UX job offers.

Roman Schoeneboom

Roman Schoeneboom

DesignOps Specialist at Siemens Smart Buildings

  

Roman Schoeneboom has over 11 years of research and design experience working within leading global organizations such as Tesco PLC, Lloyds Banking Group, Credit Suisse AG, EY, IKEA, and Siemens.

He is a user-centric, creative problem solver, and provides design execution, design-at-scale, research, and facilitation. As a design leader, he applies his knowledge and experience to the advantage of the organizations he is employed by, helping them identify and meet the needs of their customers.

Roman actively seeks to measure and improve customer experience beyond short-term fixes and provides the most value when having a seat at the strategy table.

 
Roman’s website: www.bridgingcomplexityfast.com
Marcel Bieri

Marcel Bieri

Mentor for Interaction Design & Prototyping

 

Marcel has been working mainly in the insurance sector in recent years. For the last 5 years, he led a UX team and built up the discipline in the company.

Since November 2020 he has been working as a senior consultant at VIU AG in Zurich.

The MAS in Human-Computer Interaction Design gave him insight into all disciplines of design. In recent years he has specialized in interaction design and has developed a great passion for prototypes. He firmly believes that good products can only be created in a team.

Roos Durieux

Roos Durieux

UX Research Lead

 

Always curious, extravert, focusing on equity, and with a passion for facilitating workshops and design sprints. With a background in Service Design, Employee Experience, and Customer Centric design, she is now leading a small UX Research team as chapter lead. 

Roos approaches projects holistic, not only focusing on the UX touchpoint but looking at the challenges and opportunities from a broader perspective. This often comes with creating customer journeys, personas, and involving several departments and not just the UX / product (think about cross functional collaborations with Sales, Support, Marketing, Data, etc.).

As a mentor, Roos can help you in the areas of qualitative UX Research, but also in the areas of the similar but more strategical Service Design and Customer Experience design. You can also reach out to bounce ideas on project management, like stakeholder management, cross functional collaboration, roadmaps, product strategy, etc. She also has a strong passion for facilitation of workshops and design sprints.

Dario Albanesi

Dario Albanesi

Experience Design Manager

 

Dario is a design practitioner with a background in digital product design, usability engineering, information architecture and design operations. Dario has worked with several industry majors in Switzerland – from redesigning the user experience for Jobs.ch where he scaled the UX team and increased efficiency with DesignOps methodologies; to improving the customer product decision journey on the e-commerce platform Digitec Galaxus; prototyping a centralised loyalty platform for Bayer; or exploring the possibilities of a seamless o2o customer experience for Primark. His backpack is filled with a broad knowledge in various industries and design areas.

He loves to bridge the gap between design and technology. Dario is an Experience Design Manager and currently runs the ResearchOps practice Europe at EPAM. He is also chapter president of the DesignOps community in Switzerland (designops.lol).”

Roland Sailer

Roland Sailer

Designer and innovator, human-centered and business-minded

 

Roland Sailer has worked on strategy, concept, and design for ground-breaking planning and management tools, world-changing websites and disruptive product innovation.

As an experienced UXD and consultant, he formalized, optimized, evangelized and operationalized agile and human-centered methodologies. His clients range from global enterprise to SMEs and startups covering most industries.

He’s great at motivating, coaching, developing and empowering teams and contributes to the development of «design, innovation, branding» through talks at conferences and teaching at universities.

David Kohler

David Kohler

Head of Customer Experience

David Kohler is currently Head of Customer Experience, Region International at Roche Diabetes Care, leading customer engagement, e-commerce, customer service and retention.
Since 1999, he has led UX design teams and projects in several international firms, delivering new digital environments as well as strategic and service design initiatives.  While well-versed in the ethos, approaches, and tools in human-centric design, David offers a pragmatic, real-world point of view on the business value of design, how to have more impact as a design leader, and how to develop broader career options.
David is particularly interested in supporting and bringing more women into leadership positions in design, technology and business.
Susanne Kreuz

Susanne Kreuz

Sen. UX Researcher, Consultant and Mentor

When Susanne lost her first job in the financial crisis 2003, a business women mentoring program helped her starting her own tech business. Her longing to deeply understand people and their actions let her immerse in UX research and analysis.
 
Today, Susanne ensures that products and services fit the user’s needs. With a background in psychology, she knows how to ask the right questions. As a UX consultant, she specialised in complex business solutions and has worked with SAP, Deutsche Bahn, Union Investment, and many others.
 
Susanne loves to facilitate collaborative workshop formats such as Google Sprint. Because the best solutions evolve when a variety of cultural backgrounds and disciplines work together. Design is not only a mindset, but team work! Let’s find out, where is your place in that jungle.
 
Susanne’s website: www.susa-kreuz.de
Johan Verstraete

Johan Verstraete

Inclusive Sensory Experience Designer

 

 Johan co-designs inclusive experiences for human beings and is trying to use digital solutions to broaden the human experience through multi-sensory modalities.

As a leader in Inclusive Design, he sees his Deafness and expertise in non-verbal communication and interaction as an asset. He has already collaborated with companies like Google, Adobe and the Lufthansa Group.

He also worked as a mentor to design students at several universities in the United States of America. His belief is that mentorship is about empowerment.

Elizabeth Immer

Elizabeth Immer

Product Design Lead

 

Elizabeth is a product design lead with a background applying behavioral economics to product. She is deeply experienced in user research and the interpretation and translation of research results into impactful products.

 
In her earlier agency-side work, she built up a pioneering “behavioral customer experience” practice group. There, she and her team worked with business engineers, interaction designers and visual designers to support clients in approaching their goals with a behavioral lens and applying insights from behavioral economics to build better end-to-end products. Today, she leads a team of UX, CX and visual design specialists at SHERPANY.
 
As a mentor, Elizabeth supports mentees in exploring and articulating their skills and interests in a compelling frame, and building out their “toolboxes” to become more impactful. An American transplant based in Zürich since 2013, Elizabeth is by now adept at navigating cultural challenges in the Swiss employment market.
Isabelle Haller

Isabelle Haller

Head of Research

 

With 20 years of experience in the areas of UX, Customer Intelligence, InnovationThinking, Social Media and HR, Isabelle can help you to follow your path. As a line and people manager, she is known as a persistent sparring partner, empowerer and coach with bite: enabling space for change, accompanying people in the change process or setting targeted impulses by providing other perspectives are her strengths.

As Head of Research at Scout24 Schweiz AG, the consistent customer focus is indispensable and the multi-method approach allows every product development to draw on the full potential.

Dimitar Ivanovski

Dimitar Ivanovski

UX/UI Front-End Engineer

 

Dimitar transitioned to UX from a career in engineering. He is interested in everything UX-related: research, design, programming, testing, scaling with tools, adopting standardized processes, and best practices.

His aim is to always identify and prioritize critical issues that help to define the scope of any project in order to deliver the highest impact for the end-users.

He is highly goal-oriented and finds great pride and satisfaction when implementing ideas that are complex yet easy to use. As a mentor, he offers a unique focus on Computer Science and Information Technology with the lens of UX.

Sonal Srivastava

Sonal Srivastava

Design Research Leader and Mentor

 

Sonal is a Design Research lead facilitating user-driven tech and business innovation for leading big tech organizations like Microsoft, Uber, and Samsung for over 8 years.

She has led research and product strategy initiatives for global markets in domains spanning healthcare, education, productivity solutions, transportation, etc.

She is passionate about solving challenging real-world problems through Design Thinking. She brings this approach to her mentorship and coaches UXers to find their best.

Our partners

Matt Gilberthorpe

Matt Gilberthorpe

Head of Talent Acquisition

Behind every great product, there is a great team. Matt builds the teams that build the products, relying on an unparalleled network a deep understanding for how startups and UX teams operate.

As the Head of Talent Acquisition for a Zurich based Fintech startup and co-founder of Phase2, he met the challenge to pick the best candidates to build a successful UX team from scratch.

In his career, he crossed the path of new comers to the industry and knows their struggle to prove their value during a job interview. During interview coaching sessions, Matt relies on his expertise to help program participants learn winning interview techniques for a great start in their UX career.

Myriam Jessier & Augustin Delporte

Myriam Jessier & Augustin Delporte

Senior Search Engine Optimization Experts

 

Myriam and Augustin work at PRAGM, a small web agency specialised in search experience.

These two experts focus on search engine experience. Need help to better manage Google Analytics, Google Data Studio or Google Tag Manager? Augustin is there!

Need to better understand what’s going on within Google’s results pages (ads or organic)? Myriam is the consultant for you. During their MasterClasses, User Wizards mentees learn  the fundamentals of Google Analytics for UX-lers.

Our advisors and partners

Jeremy Hulette

Jeremy Hulette

Advisor and Mentor

Jeremy is a design leader and practitioner, who helps build digital products and the teams that create them. Currently the Director Product Design & UX for Crowdhouse, and previously leading design for Advanon, Zattoo TV, UBS Investment Bank, Netflix. In Zurich, he co-founded and runs the Design Leadership Therapy Group.

Besides being a confident communicator and innovator, he is a dedicated mentor, team lead, and an early supporter of this project. Participants of this program benefit greatly from his expertise and deep knowledge of the industry.

Melita Gaupp

Melita Gaupp

Founder of scout & source

 

Melita is a passionate sourcer and a people lover. Unlike the average recruiter, she knows success is based on establishing trust and credibility, understanding the candidate’s story, and being curious about his or her next steps.

She made it her mission to take her knowledge and network to co-shape careers and make the perfect match between companies and individuals.

Thanks to her rich experience, she sees the opportunity of collaborating with career transitioners and takes the time to appreciate their particular capacities and how they would fit into a new environment.

Caroline Bauden

Caroline Bauden

Sr. Experience Designer

 

Caroline is currently Senior Experience Designer at SwissRe, promoting the CX and UX capabilities within the organization while demonstrating its impact on business projects.

Caroline brings energy and passion to transform organizations into more customer-centric businesses. She promotes a pragmatic approach to learning by doing, convinced that everyone can become a good CX/UX practioner with the right mindset shift.

She has gathered her experience in various industries, from eBay to Credit Suisse including
Procter and Gamble or Vorwerk and through a large variety of approaches and methods.
She loves keeping one leg in the design of digital products and services and the other in the build of customer-centric strategies.