← Aleksandra Hristov

About me

I’ve started working as a web designer in 2009 and I’ve been building UX team(s) since 2012 through all hassles of an exponentially growing company. Mostly focused on UX engineering as the link between design and development, but also working on DesignOps (building an effective design organization) and promoting UX as a top-level business strategy. I love mentoring people and I’m proud to see them thrive.

I love learning about our users’ problems and trying to solve them in the best possible way both from usability and accessibility side, but also having in mind the technical feasibility (and very often, challenging it :)). I’m passionate about design systems, pushing the idea of component-based design and development into practice, since 2015.

I’m very happy that throughout the years I’ve worked with amazing people and we’ve managed to build unique and user friendly experiences through both services and products. I love working on design systems as I see them as an enabler for both design and frontend teams.

Recently I’ve been experimenting and building prototypes with AI tools, strictly guiding my friend Claude through details and polishing the experiences, as in this portfolio which I tried to vibe-code but I’m still reviewing the output 🫣.

Off the record

🌐 I blog since 2006 (with great pauses :D) and you can check out the work-related articles at my Medium profile. I have other older blogs for travel and casual street style. I have had many public talks both in-house and public events, I always accept invitations for speaking to students. I live on the internet, but try to disconnect for the sake of my daughters.

♻️ 🌱🚲 I try to be eco-conscious of the impact I have with my daily actions and the way I raise my kids. I realized way back that I can’t change the world, but I can change my local micro-world and I’m trying my best doing it. I’m not vegan (yet), but I try to have more veggie-based dinners. Dreaming of having a garden one day even though I’m too lazy to maintain one :)

👨‍👩‍👧‍👧 Hristov is my maiden name. I have two daughters, and along with my husband, we’re all born in August ☀️

Talk to me about

Working with me

I’m an open book, you can ask me anything. I’m probably an introvert that worked hard on being more approachable so now I talk and write a LOT, but I long to be alone and I enjoy it whenever I can afford the time. I like getting to know the people I work with, and a job is never just a job for me.

I’m not only curious in what we’re doing now but also about the long-term vision and strategy - I like having a guiding star ✨

I’m all about my team. I trust in them, I invest time in them and I want to help them grow, but I also grow with them together. I vouch for them in every moment in front of others, but I will also be the strict mentor if needed :D

I love when someone picks my brain and challenges my thoughts! I try to define everything in details when I work, but if I don’t, I don’t mind if you give me open feedback if something needs to improve. This goes both in my area of expertise but also the way I act or when I learn new stuff. I like to hear other people’s opinions before making a decision. Sometimes I am quite opinionated and sometimes rush to push towards action when we’re stuck in long streaks of analysis, but I believe into building and testing solutions. I do admit it when I’m wrong.

I value curiosity, introspection, accepting to dive in the challenges of the unknown, trying and doing hard work, even if it doesn’t give the best results immediately… it does on the long run! On the other side, I do try to work on my personal biases and I still respect people choosing not to grow as long as there are clear expectations and completion of what is their responsibility.

I believe in continuous learning and feedback and won’t wait until the end of the year for a formal feedback process. Giving and receiving negative feedback is rough on both sides, but I believe we can pack it in a nice and respectful way and just go for it.. it’s the only way we can grow. Giving positive feedback, on the other hand, is magical - let’s boost each other more often :)

I ask a lot of questions. I will challenge your work and the product direction. Why past features have been done a certain way. Frontend vs. backend nagging. Why building stuff in JS when you can solve them in CSS. Accessible frontend code and structure. I will get back and challenge my own solutions, too. I believe in revisions and improvements over time and everyone should be responsible to report (and fix) the things they consider that are not good enough. I go by the motto “there’s no stupid question”, unless when it really is :D

I’m a systems thinker. I tend to collect as much information as possible and find patterns and connections that are not always obvious. I like to reuse solutions to offer consistency and optimize processes.

I’m a night owl. I rarely get to dive into full focus-mode, but when I do, I do my best deep-thought work and I might ignore everything around for hours - usually late at night so I don’t get disturbed… and oversleep the next morning.

Reach out on Slack, but skip to the point with no-hellos :)

When working with the USA, I start later in the morning around 10am and I’m available until 6pm. Sometimes I block my calendar during the day and catch up at night when I’ll probably schedule a ton of messages for people to get the next morning :)

* You can also chase me around Figma if I’m late on meetings :D

I take vacations. You should, too. I have always valued them and when I’m off with my family, I’m really OFF and won’t check my email. You can always Slack me, but emphasize that it’s urgent! Most of the time, it’s really not.

My failure modes

😶‍🌫️ Distractions & solutionizing

I tend to get distracted and drift away around other ideas as we discuss some topic, feel free to bring me back by saying “solutionizing” or “let’s discuss this in another meeting” - but take notes cause it usually sticks with me and I’ll bring the topic back every time :D

⏳ Procrastination & prioritization

I work a lot but I’m also a pro-level procrastinator and tend to work on smaller tasks that are not so important (like this page) while the big issues are simmering in my sub-consciousness waiting for an all-nighter. If you need me to work on something urgently, just give me a strict deadline and that will push me into my flow.

☯️ Biases

Sometimes I may sound patronising, but it’s really not my intention, I’m truly open for collaboration. If I sound like I have prejudice*, it’s probably about something that I haven’t really put a thought into, but I’m constantly working on it and try to empathize with people that are in a different position than me. Feel free to call me out.

* I will probably judge people, though, if they act irresponsibly, do sloppy work without an effort to improve, or disrespect other team members based on who they are (especially emphasized towards women).

Work life story

For the ones that like long reading, not tldr;

I started learning Photoshop while I made the high-school newspaper “Vizija” at Korchagin (yes, I also did the graffiti around town). I knew I wanted to go more visual so between architecture and computer sciences I chose the latter. During the studies, I always took classes that are more on the frontend side. I was a lab demonstrator (assistant) for the subject of “Web design” and I knew (and still do) the entry HTML & CSS lessons by heart since I had to repeat them 14 times a week.

My first internship in the frontend area was redesign of a forum for an institute as part of the university in Krakow (the other two internships were totally irrelevant) as part of the IAESTE organization - International exchange of students for technical experience. First job was as a web designer at a smaller website studio Vertigo NME that was just starting off and I had no idea how to actually code my more complex (and totally unsuitable for web) designs but I had a lot of time to read and learn during work which gave me a great foundation.

I moved on to the Swiss-founded company - Netcetera as the first employed “web designer” ever at the end of 2010 and together with another engineer from Zurich, who got masters in Interaction Design, we established the UX Office two years later, which reached 25+ team members over the following 9 years. I was also heavily involved in the corporate culture building, mentoring, a part of the Local seminar organising committee and very active in all social and community activities during my time there, like helping out the Pulse.eco project or the Neta comic.

My favourite project ever was the Path-Coordination System, it was for planning international train routes for Railnet Europe - both because of the complexity of the subject and all different use cases and parties involved, but also because I worked in a great team who accepted my challenge to build the first pattern library in Angular or my crazy auto-generated combination ideas, and a great mentor to whom I’ll be forever grateful, who challenged my thoughts and who believed we can do great things - including the UX process in the project for the first time in-house - which made me who I am today.

After my second maternity leave I was working more and more on administrative aspects for my team members instead of projects and mentoring, and moved on to work on a product that was not led in a user-centric way. I had a different vision for UX in our projects & products, and for the growth of my team, which didn’t match the vision of our company’s leadership, so after 11 years, I decided to leave and join the fresh take on the product that InPlayer was about to start.

After a year of redesigning InPlayer’s product, we got acquired by JW Player and I got the honor of taking on the designers from the USA, along with my existing Macedonian team. Despite the uncomfortable beginning, I managed to create a coherent organization where the team spirit was really felt, and I’m grateful to the whole team for accepting my leadership. I took over a huge redesign project to build a full-blown tokenized Design system in Figma from scratch and a total refactoring of the existing coded components and customer dashboard, mostly used for editorial flows for Publishers and Broadcasters. We redesigned the information architecture, the visual design of the components, the interaction with some of them, created Personas with their jobs to be done to have them in our mind when we worked on product features, and oversaw and mentored my team’s work during feedback meetings and 1-to-1s.

The merger came with the company called Connatix, so we became JWP Connatix and later JWX. I took over the team that was based in Romania and went through building a merged organization, again. Thanks to the whole team for being open to collaboration, we achieved a great atmosphere and collaboration, everyone feeling as part of the team and appreciated for their efforts. The whole team led new product integrations while continuing to improve the existing ones.

Somewhere along the way, I started taking on some product management responsibilities around the core features of the customer dashboard, but also initiated simplification of other products that were affecting the information architecture.