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Elsevier
UX Design direction, innovation, design systems


I help Academics and Researchers to discover, review, manage papers and publish their own work.
I also manage a team of 18 designers and 3 managers, distributed across London, Amsterdam, and the U.S., together we design data driven solutions for:

  • Mendeley, a reference manager that enables academics and researchers to  store, organise, note, share and cite references and research data.

  • ScienceDirect, the platform of choice for many researchers to discover new content and publish their work.

  • Knovel, preferred tool for engineers and students to speed up R&D specifically for engineering.

  • Journal Branded Solutions, a content management system that allows journals and publications such as Cell and The Lancet to have their online presence.

Design direction


Through ongoing collaboration with the VP of engineering and the VP of Product, I set up the design direction for the portfolio of products that I manage, making sure that each year design contributes strategically to each product strategy, fulfilling the business’ objectives, bringing our customers’ voice at the forefront of our conversations. With the UX Leadership Group (Creative Director, Head of UX Research, VP of Design, Design Directors and Managers) I ensure that: 

  • Our customers’ voice is always represented and integrated in business decisions and product development, we make sure that all design decisions are data-driven and supported by research.

  • The design direction is connected with the overall portfolio and product strategy, fulfilling business objectives while prioritising customer needs.

  • The design language constantly evolves, in connection with the overall branding strategy of Elsevier and each individual product’s identity. This creates a cohesive user experience across products, keeping accessibility embedded into the design thinking, and contributes to a unified design system.

Innovation


We focus on GenAI, balancing long term and short term vision, leveraging all learnings we gather from explorations, iterations, failing at speed. I enable the design team to:

  • Design is involved at early stages of the innovation process, we bring our customers’ voice in the conversation so that all bets are based on customers’ needs and are connected to the researcher’s workflow. As a result we are able to implement short - term solutions into product, balancing those with more disruptive innovations bets for the future.

  • Collaborate effectively, fostering a strong collaboration between design, product, and technology teams. We make sure to involve each team member in early exploratory research, building empathy through workshops, understanding the problem together. As a result, the participation to hackathons has seen an increase of prototypes created in collaboration between engineering, design and product.

  • Understand innovation through data, encouraging adoption of advanced analytics tools, so we make sure we guide the decision making process, with the view to speed up experimentation, to become faster and more comfortable with failure. 

Team management


I work with everybody developing each individual’s career path within Elsevier and beyond, and I make sure that all designers feel empowered to do their best work. Team management activities involve:

  • Ongoing focus on collaborative team culture, fostering a team culture based on knowledge sharing, curiosity, and continuous feedback, while promoting a psychologically safe working environment. This is particularly important because the team is based in different locations: London, Amsterdam, and United States.

  • Strategic Career Development, I work with all my reports to set up individual objectives and career paths, with Elsevier and beyond. This helps to align personal growth with organisational needs.

  • Organisational design, I regularly review team’s topology to make sure that each designer is well placed in the organisation, and we are able to deliver towards the business objectives. As a result, voluntary attrition was below 2% in the last three years. 

Design System Strategy


Before being Design Director for our Academics and Researchers products, I crafted the strategy and business case for the Design System for our group, which is still the baseline for the work we are doing today towards our current design system. My work involved:

  • Developing the strategy and business case for Academic and Government Design system, to improve the experience of designers and engineers, and build consensus across senior stakeholders. This led the business to invest in the project, so that we could build an initial cross product design system for a small set of products, which was used as pilot, and was ready to be scaled.

  • Creating a design system community, we created a thriving community of designers and engineers across different product teams and we started a stream of work to align the design language across products, which led to have a full set of primitives and tokens, constantly evolving.

  • Adoption strategy at product level, I am guiding adoption of our Design system in the portfolio of products I manage: Knovel, ScienceDirect, Journal Branded Solutions, Mendeley. These products are quite diverse so we have different adoptions models and roadmaps.