Updated: February 2025

To read a bit more about my work experiences
- Service , UX, research, some UI, with big companies and the Public sector and NGOs, on existing or new products -

or outside of work
- teaching and volunteering -

I recommend you open my portfolio from desktop, or even better, write me at ducducfr@hotmail.it

- here is my CV in PDF

I am a generalist more than a specialist.
Asking questions, a bit of skepticism, and a bit of idealism is what makes me a (I think) good designer.

I often took care of all of the design package: research, UX, UI, support onf the implementation, and occasionally product ownership and support to the user adoption. activities.

A cool project I worked on in here:
The re-design of the internal communication and organization platform (intranet) for Iren, a multi-utility group made of tens of smaller companies, with around 10.000 total employees.
The project was carried out in an Agile setting.

Why was it cool to work on this
We had to design for both the back-end users (editorial and communication team) and the end-users (the employees), which posed a double challenge. Both user groups are highly varied: engineers, technicians, field workers, ..

What did I do

• Co-design sessions with the client
• User research and benchmark evaluation
• UX design (Information Architecture and structure of the platform, wireframing, user flows, microcopy)
• Collaborated with the UI designer process in building the design system
• Building and maintaining the digital prototype
• User testing
• Writing the front-end functional documents
• Educational activities for the internal editorial team to support the adoption

I worked as Service designer, mainly focusing on user research and workshop facilitation activities.

A cool project I worked on here
I designed and carried out as facilitator a series of online workshops for professionals working for eastern-Europe municipalities, funded by the NGO GIZ. Our goal was to help the participants analyze and reflect on the current state of digitalization of their services; their goals regarding it; inject notions of user-centeredness and user research; support them in defining a reachable starting point for each of their specific challenges.

Why was it cool to work on this
Cultural, background and language barriers made it challenging to obtain a spontaneous and lively discussion, together with the fact that participating cities had very different goals and needs.

What did I do

• Design of the workshops (the concept, structure, the activities, to the realization of digital board we used)
• Research and analysis of the case studies
• Carry out the workshops as facilitator - online, handling between 5-10 participants each time
• Mapping theresults and writing the research report for GIZ - the client.

Both individually and with my former Master's colleague (and close friend) Valentina Dzhekanovich, we started organizing classes and workshops in university settings, starting from our Alma Maters.
Our topics are based on the gap we perceived between the acedemia, and skills we found crucial to be effective on the job

Usual topics

• Talking design with everyone: learning to communicate about our discipline with anybody and in any context, to be able to collaborate with anybody and in any context
• Design everywhere & everything: Mindset and tools to find opportunities to bring value through designer's skills in any field through varied mediums - not only apps and AI chatbots.

Where
University of Bologna, Service design master's
Estonian Academy of Arts, Interaction design master's

What's next
The gig in the already mentioned universities has become a yearly appointment for the next years
+
I am/we are building further connections with other institutions, including some outside of the design fields or that offer classes for NEETS.

I have crafted for myself, together with the volunteers at Camminare Insieme (on the left, my mst trusted collaborators), a volunteering role as a designer - using skills and activities from Service and UX design.

The association
Camminare Insieme is a free clinic based in Torino. It offers medical and dental services, education around health topic and social support for free to anybody unable to access the national sanitary system, mostly undocumented immigrants and homeless people.

What do I do
I am using Human-Centered methods and a service design approach to:

• ease the internal bureaucracy and workflows: redsigning documents, challenging the process, ..
• help the ongoing digitalization process of the association's activities with the UX of digital tools
• help designing and writing a more efficient and usable knowledge base for new or current volunteers

These are of intervention emerged after a lenghty observation, a series of interviews, and acting as a "generic" volunteer
(and mapping the findings in the blueprint, a piece of which is on the left)

Here's a synthesis of my main experiences:

?

I have a wide range of responsibilities as designer on innovative projects based in AI, GenAI and Dat a Science. My role is crucial in acting as the middle ground between the tech (complex and hard to understand), the users, the business.

Main activities:

• Creation and facilitation of workshops: discovery workshops, scenario definition, problems and opportunities definition and prioritization

• User research and analysis/mapping of the insights

• Assessment of the data, supporting my technical colleagues mapping, understanding and making sense of them, and facilitating the collaboration with the client's data/IT teams

• Design of everything concerning the solution, always in an iterative co-design path with users and stakeholders, which can be a service blueprint/user journeys to-be or a digital prototype (starting from the wireframes to the UI, including testing with users)

• Production of technical and implementation documents