ALLIE KANDEL

I have always loved puzzles and problem solving.

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I came to UX in a roundabout way. When I first graduated from school, "UX" wasn't a term that I was familiar with and wasn't the industry that it is today. I began my career at Goldman Sachs, where I did risk, efficiency and project management. While there, I had the chance to design and launch two different client applications. From there, I knew I needed to be doing work in the design field. 

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I left Goldman to run a health and wellness company, Caravan Wellness. At Caravan, I rebranded the building and designed a video streaming platform. I designed every interaction that a user had with Caravan, from the moment that they first heard about Caravan to the moment that they pushed play on their first video. I loved thinking about what a user needs and how to make our content engaging and interesting.

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From Caravan, I went to Meetup, where I bridged the product, engineering, sales, and business strategy teams as a project manager. I ran beta programs for new products and architected a Salesforce instance to track our sales cycle. And for the first time, worked for a company with a UX team. And then it clicked -- there were people that got to do the things that I loved to do, and they got to do it officially. 

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I completed the User Experience Design Intensive course at General Assembly, and since then, have been working with brands, large and small, to incorporate their users' needs and wants into their products. I bring a sense of playfulness, a love of strategy, and a deep appreciation of product to every project.

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If you're looking for an actual about me section -- when not designing, I can be found in NYC with my husband, Mike. I am always cooking something new, adopting new hobbies (hello, embroidery!), and planning our next trip (Australia, whenever Covid ends...).