Daniel Migliorelli

So, who am I?

I am a user experience research and design lead with more than 20 years of experience working on digital products and services. 

I was born and raised in Bahía Blanca. One of those middle-of-nowhere cities that feel even smaller than what they really are. Certainly off the must-see places list you made if visiting Argentina, but just in case: travelling south from Buenos Aires just follow the coast for around 800km, it's right before where our great Patagonia starts.

That place is where a got a very traditional graphic design education at a visual arts school. And I mean letraset, photocopies and acrylic painting for fixes traditional education, not a laptop at sight! Modern internet was rising with Google and then Facebook, but my design school was lagging behind 20 years from the very start.

I'll give you a sample of that: once our typography professor sneaked out from work straight to class with a blue Apple G3 so we could see how one works from somewhat near (she was automatically the coolest!). By that time I started to flirt with things like html and css on my free time and heard there were some standards that would help anybody using any type of device to use a website. I have been an UCD advocate since that moment.

With the years, my graphic design business card turned into web design, leading to interaction and usability and then broadening into 'user experience'. Communication plans turned into product strategy and roadmaps. Design craft turned into user and design research, critical thinking and management. All that while moving from basic websites to native mobile apps in the j2me era, and then to complex mobile web and native products and services.

In 2017, after living and working in Buenos Aires city for 10 years, I moved from a noisy-and-always-busy city to the bonnie Scotland. 

Then again, with years my LinkedIn profile stopped mentioning private sector companies to start mentioning public sector orgs and government. This was no coincidence, but a plan that I waited for years to execute.

I have now worked as part of teams all across the spectrum: from new to well- seasoned ones, strategy-only to delivery-only, between purely business roles to shoulder-to-shoulder with developers and product managers. I have also helped build research and digital design inhouse teams, and been hired as an external consultant many times as well. And of course not all of them were completely functional, mature and a joined-up ballet crew...

All along that journey, I have been there for the launching of a small startup about to disrupt the market, and also by the ship's helm in big private and public sector organisations. Some of them were tech companies, some of them were not. With the years, my role organically became less about tech capability and more about people and their needs, and that is something I am really proud of.

I have found user-centred design to be a great cultural transformation tool and technological advancement a social catalyser. But the design of products and services is now required to be human and planet-centred. This is nothing else than an organic continuation of the user-centred design practice. Inevitably, technology shapes our interactions and context. However, it is our responsibility to be culturally ready to make the best possible use of it.

This is why I see user research and user-centred design as the best fitting tools I can use to:

1) tackle high social impact issues
2) make people grow professionally in a product or service environment
3) catalyse the corporate structures towards sustainable decision making, by giving them a human experience focus on what they do and how it is achieved.

On a side note, I am not only a total geek for design! I spend lots of time geeking on other subjects. That's now mainly flight sims, coffee, whisky, music and audio equipment. But bring your own geeky subject, who knows?! I am curious about how most things work, known for disassembling home appliances with different rates of success in the reassemble stage of the process… and for designing a rocket ship while in kindergarten.
The sky's the limit!