A young woman smiling, with dark hair and wearing a long-sleeve top and jewelry, standing outdoors.

Hey there! I’m Havana Nguyen and I have been a User Experience Designer for 10 years across many industries: real estate, aerospace, healthcare, and ecommerce. I’ve got a torrid love affair with user-centric design thinking and deep dives into problem statements. My design philosophy is simple:

Make it work. Make it easy. Make it happen.

I have made it to Medium’s Top 20 Writers for my two articles for Interaction Flows and Designing Tables for Reusability and I was the lead for Ladies that UX ATL Meetup between 2020 - 2025, where I grew membership from 2500 to 4000+.

Primary skills

Handdrawn circle with a UX wireframe sketch inside

Prototyping and design

My mental library of interface patterns arms me with a penchant for rapid ideation, which helps us explore a wide range of ideas before narrowing and validating the best pattern for the end user.

I use AI tools like Figma Make and Lovable like my army of interns to help scale up ideation to cut down on production time and use LLMs to also help audit my designs for edge cases and accessibility issues.

Handdrawn circle with a magnifying glass doodle

Discovery and validation

I have conducted discovery for a pandemic dashboard with medical directors and crisis response teams and a brand new electronic informed consent tool for a healthcare company. I’m not afraid to ask why and get to the root of a problem statement.

I also have evaluative research and A/B testing experience to help validate and strength product design decisions.

Handdrawn circle with a graph where an arrow is going up

Stakeholder management

Ever had end users be really hostile at you for even considering a redesign of their software? I have, and I won them over through empathetic listening and creating user-centric designs that reflected their real-world workflows.

But wait, there’s more

Illustration

I have been an artist since I could pick up a pencil. In my UX work, I can contribute storyboards, illustrations, concept sketches, and more. Check out my artwork here.
Public Speaking

I completed Toastmasters and have spoken to audiences of up to 3,000 people and presented to clients and executives.
Artificial Intelligence

I partner with AI (I use a range of tools like ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, n8n, Lovable, Figma Make, Perplexity) to scale up my productivity on my UX workflow. This helps me ideate and assess more broadly and get things done more quickly. See how I integrate AI in my process.
Workshop Facilitation

My biggest pet peeve is meetings that circle the drain and go nowhere. I have created workshops to extract insights, pain areas, and attain alignment even with the most stubborn stakeholders. See how I facilitated workshops to create the product roadmap and requirements for a pandemic tracking dashboard.

A peek into how I work

Designing Reusable Tables

I was tasked with one of the most complex components in our Design System: tables. See how I got consensus from a team of 15 across ten different products and worked with engineers to make a table component that worked for everyone. Read article
Interaction Flows

Our devs kept falling behind on sprints because the time zone difference prevented them from quick answers to interactions, edge cases, and behaviors on our designs. Using Dan Saffer’s “Microinteractions” book, I created a new handoff artifact to shorten this gap and help devs complete builds on time. Read article
Discovery Workshop with Customer Support Teams

Ah, the bane of every UX researcher: lack of access to users. Here’s a workshop format I used to extract the biggest pain points from customers using an underrated source of info: support teams! Watch video

What others have said

"Havana’s expertise [...] of the users was relied upon heavily. It was almost as if she was a second product manager on the team!"

Xander Boston, Product Manager
"Havana is one of the most talented designers that I have had the pleasure of working with. I managed her at CareerBuilder, and, I must say, of all the hires that I've made, she is one of the best."

Christopher Harness, Product Design Manager
"She effortlessly applies her artistic talents to creating polished and modern interfaces. She always brings a smile and a wonderfully positive energy! All in all, Havana is one of the best UX designers that I have ever hired."

Michael Allenberg, UX Director
"She is an absolute joy to work with and has a passion for learning. She is always trying to improve herself from both a visual and user experience perspective."

David Braylark, Senior Product Designer

My career journey highlights

At CareerBuilder, I learned how to tackle huge legacy redesigns and work with complex business rules through their HCM product suite.
The aerospace team threw me into the deep end as I found myself surrounded by geniuses. This is where I worked on my first end-to-end project and really found my calling for complex SaaS product design.
At Florence, I was UX hire #2 so I helped establish the design and research ops for the company and trained the product team on how to run usability tests and discovery workshops. Here, I also designed a new product and a brand new market.
My first consumer-facing role! E-commerce is humbling, and here I really got to deepen my A/B testing, research, discovery, and validation skills as I test for metrics like conversion and AOV.