Daniel Swartz
Creative User Experience Design
Over 15 years experience as a founding designer in search, social media content, fintech and cloud data startups. I create simple and easy to understand interfaces for complex technical applications. Typically placed within engineering teams, I engage in close cross-functional collaboration with product, engineering, marketing, senior executives, customers and more in addition to thorough traffic analysis and A/B testing.
My primary design tools are Figma and Photoshop to wireframe and rapidly prototype product concepts for internal discussions and define engineering requirements. I was originally a front-end developer before focusing on UX design and that has influenced my design process and how I work with eng teams.
My Work: Case Studies
Ottertune: Dashboard Redesign
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A web app optimizing Amazon RDS and Aurora database performance, focusing on reducing AWS costs and improving performance and efficiency.
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Lead the redesign of the user-experience and user-interface of the company’s flagship product that optimized a customer’s Amazon RDS and Aurora database performance on AWS in order to reduce their overall spending. Key areas of focus were fleet and database dashboard overviews, performance recommendations (knobs, indexes, queries, tables), tuning options, performance charts and more.
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Full platform solution for data cloud efficiency, focusing on Snowflake data usage, efficiency and cost savings.
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Founding Designer, providing design solutions across all areas of the application. Working within the engineering team, I provided support and leadership in the development process of my design mocks and prototypes through to release. Met regularly with customers to provide solutions that best fit their needs and the executive team to align design principals with company goals and roadmap.
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This is a collection of screenshots of various projects I have worked on over the years for desktop, tablet and mobile layouts. Most are application features, but some are brand designs for marketing.
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In all of these projects, I was the lead user experience designer, in some cases taking on UI and brand design.
FAQs
What is your design philosophy?
Always anticipate and think ahead, keep moving in trying out new ideas. Take feedback and criticism as learning opportunities to improve the product and never take it personally. Always admit when you’re wrong and acknowledge other people’s ideas and contributions!
I improve upon product design through iterative steps based on traffic data, customer requests, feedback and ideas from internal teams, company goals and ongoing A/B testing.
At the same time, it’s important to carve out space to try out completely new ideas and not play it too safe if one can afford to take the risk.
Where do you live?
I live in Silicon Valley, more specifically, Redwood City. I am a US citizen.
How many years experience do you have?
As a UX designer, I have over 15 years experience working in search, social media content, fintech and cloud data tools. Prior to that, I was a front-end developer.
What design tools do you use?
My primary tool these days is Figma, which I have been working with for over 3 years. Prior to that I worked with Sketch. But through it all, I have used Photoshop and Pixelmator as my graphic design tools for UI design. Even though I have used Figma to create working prototypes, I have also created prototypes with HTML, CSS and Javascript.
What do you do in your spare time?
I have always been a person of many interests. I am a former professional musician in my years after college. I love photography, taking pictures mostly with my iPhone, but also with an older Canon EOS Rebel T2i for those times I want something large hanging around my neck. I am an avid reader, both of fiction and non-fiction, more recently focusing on Roman history, which one can’t help reading after having visited many important Roman sites over the years. And … one has to be outside as much as possible, hiking, exercising, playing with the kids and more. That’s me in a nutshell.
