Who stands behind User Wizard?

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.

Eduardo specialized in multi-market research studies to create innovative solutions and grow International businesses. He has worked with global companies like Miro, Uber (where he led the creation of the Loyalty program Uber Pro), Google or Mitsubishi Electric, both in-house and from an agency.

He brings passion and leadership to teams willing to innovate in today’s experiential world. As a mentor, he relies on his broad experience of the UX industry and leveling up Junior profiles to build the next generation of UX-lers.

Marcel has been working mainly in the insurance sector in recent years. For the last 4 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.

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 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 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.

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.

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 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.

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 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 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.

As a passionate wordsmith and tech enthusiast with a degree in linguistics and business studies, Annie has found her path to UX Writing after working as a Copywriter in a Swiss Fintech company.

To intuitively guide users through digital products with her copy, she combines several areas of knowledge such as linguistics, UX, design, research, branding and business strategy and works closely with product teams and stakeholders.

As your mentor, she is excited to share her experience and insights into real-life product examples and help you position yourself in the youngest but increasingly demanded field of UX.

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.

“The secret to being successful on LinkedIn is NOT to post all the time. But it’s to dare to have an authentic and personal profile that is fully optimized for the algorithm. “

Virginie encourages career transitioners to create their own career opportunities with a LinkedIn profile that works for them, coupled with strategic networking. It’s about working smarter, not harder.

In her MasterClass, participants learn how to optimize their LinkedIn profile, tell their career story, connect the dots of their work history, define their career development strategy and reach out to the right people with the right message.

See Virginie’s website and learn how to leverage the power of your LinkedIn profile.

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.

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.