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BRETT MARALDO

DIGITAL  DESIGN + LEADERSHIP

CORE COMPETENCIES

Strategy: Able to identify critical path, risks and mitigation.

Tactics: Able to efficiently execute detailed quality delivery.

Innovation
: Identify & implement new opportunities.

Insightfulness: Quick to identify needs & expectations.

Versatility: Adaptable to novel and changing impacts.

Efficiency: Able to quickly determine optimal solutions.

Flexibility: Able to collaborate & communicate positively. 

Resiliency: I remain focused and calm.

EXPERIENCE

ORGANIZATIONS

Bell User Experience Centre (agency)
Canopy Growth Corp. (in-house)
CIBC (in-house)
City of Toronto (in-house)
Cossette (agency)
Klick Health (agency)
Manulife (in-house)
Mass Minority (agency)
Momentum Digital (agency)
OVEN Digital (agency)
Sapient (agency)
Rogers Media (in-house)
TD Bank (in-house)
Texas Instruments (in-house)
Thomson Reuters (in-house)

LEADERSHIP & MANAGEMENT

Bell UX Centre (Lead UX Design & Research)
Canopy Growth Corp. (UX Manager)
City of Toronto (Lead UX Designer)
Hydro One (Lead UX Designer)
Manulife (Principal UX Designer)
Maple Media (Lead UX Researcher)
Momentum Digital (Lead Digital Designer)
Nulogy (Product Owner)
Sapient (Lead UX Designer)
Sparkrock (UX/UI Consultant)
Texas Instruments (Lead UX Designer)
Thomson Reuters (Manager Digital Design)

PRODUCT

Canopy Growth Corp. (CPG eCommerce)
Bank of Montreal (self-brokerage)
CIBC (B2C insurance)
Hydro One (customer portal)
Formsflow.ai (PaaS)
Manulife (B2C insurance)
Maple Media (content)
Nulogy (supply chain management)
Rogers Digital Media (media exchange)
Sparkrock (enterprise management)
StickerYou (online stickers e-comm)
Texas Instruments (semiconductors)
Thomson Reuters (tax & accounting)

DESIGN CAPABILITIES

LEADERSHIP & MANAGEMENT

With extensive experience in waterfall, Agile, Lean, or whatever your process is I can work with it. I work to continuously improve our ways of working to enable seamlessness with  organization.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

By bringing our customers into the design process we can ensure the  design more directly meets users’ needs and requirements. Happy customers...  happy business partners.

INTERACTION DESIGN

I can create wireframes quickly so that all project partners can benefit from visualizing their requirements. Further refinements become collaborative enabling quality and desirability.

 EVIDENCE BASED DESIGN

The key to a good design is understanding our customers, whether we have our own internal customer insights or have the ability to collect and analyze direct customer insights.

MOCKUPS & PROTOTYPES

I transform  wireframes into visual designed mockups that communicate the look and feel of the final solution. I create working prototypes so that users and partners can experience the design for a more efficient refinement process.

MULTI-PLATFORM DESIGN

Today’s digital world is accessed on many devices. I create designs  optimized to work with multiple devices. I  take into account responsive frameworks like Bootstrap, AEM or hand-coded breakpoints to improve the user’s cross-platform experience.

RECOMMENDATIONS

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Brett was a great UX Manager and mentor during my time at Canopy Growth. He was supportive whenever I needed some clarification on project expectations and requirements. He made working on projects rewarding and interesting by allowing us to work autonomously, while at the same time providing valuable feedback and challenging us to think critically about our work. Brett is very committed to creating well-informed design decisions using UX best practices and research, as well as being keen to establish a UX process within a cross-functional team. He did an excellent job of doing all of the above as our UX Manager. 

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Brett is a seasoned UX strategist that loves using all info available to design solutions. He is very thorough, detailed, and passionate about his craft.

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I reported directly to Brett while working at Canopy Growth. Brett was an encouraging mentor who challenged me to think critically about our UX recommendations. He was essential in establishing the UX processes within the digital team and advocated for the value of UX across departments. He brought his expertise to every project and was able to provide strong research-based rationale for all our decisions. Brett values usability best practices and commits to creating well-informed design decisions. Brett would be an asset to any company seeking to improve its UX capabilities.

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Brett is a true user advocate, and fully thinks through all situations and scenarios when facing a problem.
I had the pleasure of working with Brett as my manager - respectful, easy to talk to, full of constructive feedback and guidance. He is always encouraging of personal growth and challenge. Brett is a creative force with a keen vision on data-driven design. Working in his team has made me a better designer and critical thinker. He will always be someone I admire, and I look forward to having the opportunity to collaborate with him again in the future.

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I had the absolute pleasure and honour of working with Brett in THE LARGEST project of my professional life. The intelligence displayed by Brett was crucial in pushing the project through quickly. His talent in designing absolute marvels is to this day appreciated by all users. I look forward to working with Brett in future projects.

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We hired Brett when we needed some extra UX brainpower. Brett came in and adapted seamlessly to the working environment, requiring minimal supervision. He turned work around quickly with showed sound thinking to back up his design decisions. I wouldn't hesitate to work with Brett again.

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Brett provided us valuable output thru a user experience study, for our design of a complex customer service categorization model using leading techniques. The result was an effective categorization of customer interactions to gain customer insight for further continual business process improvements.

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Brett is quick to understand business problems and easily solves issues with his ability to represent user scenarios that improve business and design intent. I worked with him for two years with projects of different scope and there was passion in his work. If you want a "yes man", Brett is not that person. If you want a well thought recommendation,

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Brett has an amazing attention for detail and is very thorough in his documentation. Working collaboratively with Brett was a great experience: he can quickly provide an in-depth rationale for his approach and can rapidly adapt his work to incorporate suggestions from team members. He also provides great feedback for development in order to push the envelope to ultimately deliver a better user experience.

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i have worked with Brett for 2 years, and on a number of different projects at Sapient. Brett is a very passionate professional and truly cares to create an above average product. It has been said that many of Brett's deliverables are 'little works of art'. They are. Brett takes usability very seriously and is a strong advocate of user experience. He can see the business side, and also the consumer side.

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Brett is a seasoned user experience consultant. He has a thorough understanding of the methodologies and techniques for website user testing. When he worked as a consultant to The Globe, he delivered clear actionable results and incisive insights in a timely manner.

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I worked for Brett in a consultative role. I found his direction to be concise, clear and focused. Brett's drive and dedication to his work are admirable as are his expectations of high quality deliverables. He's very astute and encourages input. I'd welcome the opportunity to work with him  again

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Brett is a knowledgeable and skilled UX designer that really goes the extra mile to understand his clients' needs and those of their clients.

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Brett is very good at what he does. Brett is able to provide high quality work under tight deadlines. Excellent communication skills and thought leadership. Pleasure to work with. Nelson

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Brett is a detailed and contentious user experience designer and usability specialist. An asset to our team, he was able to quickly and efficiently digest complex challenges and define unique, compelling solutions that impressed our clients.

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Brett is an experienced and articulate advocate for online consumers. He is efficient, well-organized, analytical and to the point. These are all skills that are very important in this day and age. With all of the technical skills in the world, there is of course no substitute for common sense, which Brett exudes in abundance.

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Brett is a detail focused, quality driven IA. The quality and fidelity of his work reflects his passion for user experience design. Brett is dedicated to being the advocate of the end user and ensuring a quality, engaging and delightful experiences. Although an IA, Brett is well rounded in his experience and knowledge of user research, usability best practices and understanding/gathering business and user requirements.

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I've worked alongside Brett at two companies (the other was Oven Digital). He takes his work very seriously, and sets high standards for himself and meets them. In addition to the high quality of his work, he brings "unofficial leadership": on every project where I've witnessed his involvement, he's looked at the whole picture in order to meet the organization's objectives, including speaking up when seeing inadequacies in existing plans and proposing realistic solutions. In this way he has, on multiple occasions, transformed disaster into success.

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Brett is a fastidious UX practitioner. He is extremely well versed in usability and information design, and is a true advocate for the end user. Brett's approach is clear and thoughtful and his work is of great quality. On a recent project that he and I collaborated, Brett was a real asset to our team - without him we would have been lost.

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Brett is a very detail oriented information architect, who clearly loves his work and takes great pride in it. Over the past 3 years that I had the pleasure of working with Brett, it was evidenced by his through and well-prepared presentations that not only is he a talented information architect, but also possesses the core skills that go far in client presentations and internal educational seminars. He is a definite asset to any team, and what sets him apart is that he cares about his work, and the people around him. 

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Designing user-friendly interfaces for software is tough, but Brett made it easy. The interface was the basis of upcoming software redesigns, so it was critical that everything was correct. Brett was always conscientious of the user’s perspective as we tackled issues such as control groupings, general layout, functionality, and colours. Throughout the process, Brett was always extremely responsive to questions and willing to provide his perspective. He was also extremely knowledgeable about the specific user community and in-tune with trends and user design of other software manufactures. Brett is personable, knowledgeable, and works  efficiently. 

PORTFOLIO & CONTACT

DESIGN GOALS

OPTIMIZE DESIGN FOR USER AND BUSINESS SUCCESS
Determine optimal approach to constraints and dependencies to arrive at solutions with maximum value.

PROVIDE ROBUST RATIONALE
Design recommendations are arrived at with rationale based on critical thinking and observable evidence.

ALIGN DESIGN TO BUSINESS GOALS
Provide design recommendations that optimize the experience for users and business success.

IDENTIFY BUSINESS RISKS
Identify business risks associated with design direction.

PLEASE NOTE

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The prorietary nature of the portfolio requires requesting it using the form below.

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GUIDING UX PRINCIPLES

Provide visibility of product status
Automate workload
Reduce uncertainty
Fuse content
Use labels that are conceptually related to function
Group content contextually
Provide consistent contexts Use redundancy judiciously
Speak the customers' language
Ensure interaction are intuitiv
Ensure consistency and standards
Enlist error prevention
Align hierarchies to mental models
Reduce cognitive load
Consider appropriate and consistent use of visual design principles

GUIDING VISUAL DESIGN PRINCIPLES

Align visual hierarchy to content hierarchy
Use repetition judiciously to reincforce perception
Create cognitive emphasis using visual emphasis
Use contrast to differentiate content
Use size to differentiate content
Imply relationships by contextually arranging  elements
Create cohesion with clear visual styles and relationships
Relative relationship are created with differentiated contextual arrangements
Visual nature of repeating elements conveys an associated emotional response
Reduce visual clutter. Use white space.
Utilize design standards such as patterns, best practices and design systems
Motion is created by visually interconneting elements
Variety in element style create interest. Too much variety creates chaos.
Consider appropriate and consistent use of UX principles


My full design portfolio is available on-request using the form below.

Portfolio Request & Contact

I am located in beautiful Leslieville, Toronto

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SOURCES for Guiding Principles
National Institute of Standards & Technology, Guidelines for Usability Evaluations, J. Scholtz
International Organization for Standardization, Ergonomics of human- system interaction -- Usability Methods Supporting Human-Centred Design, ISO/TR 16982:2002 (usability methods), ISO 9241, ISO13407 (quality in use), et al.
World Wide Web Consortium, Usability Principles
Cognitive Engineering Principles for Enhancing Human-Computer Performance, Gerhardt-Powals, J., International Journal of HCI 8(2) 189-211, 1996 Designing Web Usability, Prioritizing Web Usability, Usability Engineering, Nielsen, J. 
Toptal, 12 key principles of design.

©2023 Brett Maraldo, Usability Now Inc. All rights reserved.