Michael Le - Portfolio

Designer. Creator. Leader.

Over the years I have embraced my skills in both development and design to help teams turn ideas into products. I thrive at the intersection of design, code, and human interaction.

I began my career as a developer for investment banks in New York and London. I lead small (and remote) teams to build realtime risk and pricing systems. I carry these skills with me today through implementing and maintaining design systems.

My transition to design was to find out the "why" that connects people and products. Through in-house design teams and consulting I have delivered designs backed by user research and measures of success with data.

In addition to contributing design and code, I have coached and mentored people in this space. It is blessing to help bring others along to become better designers and developers.

Designer by craft. Creator by spirit. Leader by nature.

Leading and evolving design as a team

I lead a team of designers and front end developers at Kounta (now Lightspeed). We helped hospitality businesses operate efficiently by shaping and building the software they use everyday.

From a design perspective, the product rebrand involved us translating the brand vision into product so that it elevates the experience for our customers.

From this project, along with my coding experience and love of HTML/CSS, I went on to lead the design system (React) between the design and engineering teams for delivering a consistent experience for our customers.

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Continuous discovery to refine solutions

One of the most common queries for online delivery services is "Where is my order?"

I ran workshops and research to identify opportunities for the team to improve on in the service.

The team was about to start work on a big piece of work but as we did more research we discovered flaws in what we thought the user knew. This lead us to pivot on our direction to make our final solution more usable

The moral of this story is to continually get your design in front of your customers so you can get better context.

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Designing for the masses

I always wanted to work on something that made a positive impact on many people. I worked with a great team in redesigning the Telegraph.co.uk website

My role as a UX designer was in helping with user research and bringing insights to our designs, wireframing, and prototyping. The new responsive web site was responsible for delivering content to millions of visitors every day.

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Giving back to the community

I created plugins for Sketch and Figma to make myself and my team efficient in our daily tasks.

Symbol Insert

Lookup Sketch symbols

Hemingway

Check writing style in Figma

Sticky Notes

Add notes in Figma

I write so that I can articulate my thoughts and experiences. Writing online helps share my experience with others.

I was first encouraged by my manager Jane Austin to talk about design. Public speaking was not easy for me but it has helped me convey my thoughts and message as a design leader.