# James Donovan > Design Leader Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/jamesdonovan My design career had focused on social impact and innovation. Over the past several years I have developed AI tools, ML algorithms, data vis dashboards, VR products, robotics systems, neural interfaces, and more. ## Work Experience ### Design Lead @ TikTok Jan 2025 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area ### Design Team Lead @ Quora Jan 2022 – Jan 2024 | Los Angeles, California, United States At Quora, I have focused on two primary areas: Monetization and Growth. This work spans multiple product areas including consumer-facing surfaces on Quora, the Quora Ads Manager, and a new zero to one product, Poe. ### Product Team Lead @ Kernel Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 | Los Angeles Metropolitan Area Oversee software products from conception to execution through product strategy, design direction, and team management. Drive product through design architecture for software products, and developed the Kernel design system. This modular design system allowed Kernel to scale to serve 10 times more participants. Lead a cross-functional team to deliver marketing campaigns, ship SaaS products to top-tier research institutions, and launch a consumer-focused mobile app. Under my direction, the products we build facilitate initiatives to gather neural data. The resulting ML classifiers have become foundational in developing neural data applications. ### Senior Product Designer @ DroneDeploy Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco Bay Area At DroneDeploy I am the lead designer on the insights and analysis features of the data platform. In this capacity, I am working towards a unified media analysis experience that enables cross-functional collaboration within our customer's organizations. We serve a diverse set of customers with energy, construction, agriculture, and several other industrial spaces. My goal is to design simple and elegant solutions that both generally suite multiple needs, and narrowly address and solve for complex situations. This work focuses on mobile and desktop with capabilities in the 3D modeling and geospatial mapping. I have been leading in innovation at the company, helping to develop a new proof of concepts that have grown our core business and have developed our ability to thrive in the complex B2B space post-COVID. To this ends I have learned a number of cutting edge ways to utilies new forms of media like point clouds and 360 video as well as develop software for industrial automation using newly available robots. ### Product Designer @ Meta Jan 2015 – Jan 2019 The impact I have at Facebook focuses on driving growth in the Pages business product. During my time working on growth, Pages has been one of the fastest growing products at the company. My work help establish new practices in product discovery, which builds new relationships people people and valuable content in Pages, Places, Groups, and other products. We were able to move quickly and ship multiple products that incorporated new SEO and personalization algorithms which I helped architect and file for patent. Products that I lead improved consumption of business content in News Feed, Search, and various mobile platforms. I participated in international market research in India, where we identified multiple opportunities on the ground talking with local entrepreneurs. ### Senior Designer @ The Huffington Post Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 | Greater New York City Area The Huffington Post offered the opportunity to de of multi platform mobile apps. In a short period of time I led the launch of a new analytics platform and established the launch plan for a front-end article system. I lead the design of a new highly interactive content management system for creating articles, managing front page content, organizing photos, and analyzing trends in the news and social media. The visual redesign of the CMS, called Athena, became the standard for publishing for several other products at AOL. I also led design for internationalization in Chinese and Arabic markets, helping to build relationships with industry partners. ### Lead UX Designer @ New York Magazine Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 My time at New York Media has focused on enhancing existing features to create low friction solutions for a myriad of challenges. I architected a suite of new internal tools that enable the writers, designers, and editors to create better quality content in fast and fun ways. The primary tool, Composer, is a system that allows editors to directly compose content on the real page, and gives layout suggestions and hints. I architected responsive system layouts with a modular design flexible and usable enough to increase mobile and tablet conversion by more than 20%. ### Experience Designer @ McCann Jan 2011 – Jan 2013 | Greater New York City Area As a UX designer at McCann, my primary responsibilities are to envision the complete workings of human computer interactions. I regularly generate user flows, wireframes, interactive prototypes, and to conduct in depth research on user activity and UX design patterns to demonstrate my thinking and question assumptions. Working in a small team to redesign IKEA commerce website. We solved problems that directly led to a jump in conversion equal to more than a million dollars a day. ### Web Design Editor @ Guggenheim Museum Jan 2011 – Jan 2011 | Greater New York City Area Collaborated with Apple Corporate to generate static Guggenheim imagery used in the promotional material for Mac OSX Lion. Created designs for web and print, including implementation of new Drupal components. Performed high standard quality assurance of micro sites for exhibitions and installations and legacy print content display in web. Conducted in depth surveys of analytics, code quality, and content performance. ## Education ### BFA in Digital Art New York University ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/donovanjames - Portfolio: http://www.donovanjames.com - Portfolio: http://jamesnova.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/jamesdonovan JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/jamesdonovan/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-13