# Masaki Akiyama > Design Director | Principal UX | Fractional | Early-Stage & Growth Teams Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/masaki Product and UX Designer and Director helping early-stage startups, B2B, enterprise and SaaS organizations. I design and launch user-centric digital solutions for complex business needs. I excel at creating intuitive product experiences across AI and Machine Learning, Aerospace, IT Security, and News and Editorial domains. I’ve delivered hundreds of features across dozens of products and bridge the gap between design and engineering, to build cohesive and streamlined processes. I have worked with award-winning agencies and clients across various industries, such as: 🗞️ News & Editorial 🏛️ Legislation & Business Tools ☁️ Cloud Networking 🤖 AI Literate/Vibe Coding ⛓️ Blockchain ✈️ Aerospace 👨‍⚕️ Healthcare 🛍️ Retail and Fashion Visit my portfolio website for my information. ## Work Experience ### Fractional UX Designer for Early-Stage & Growth Teams @ Independent Jan 2025 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area I am an independent and freelance director and designer for startups, agencies, and enterprise clients. ➜ Worked with award winning agency frog design on Japanese mobile app for client au by KDDI. ### Director of Design @ State Affairs Jan 2024 – Jan 2025 I led the end-to-end UX processes—from user research and wire framing to prototyping and usability testing— I shaped the entire product’s UX from the ground up including implementing a design system that unified the desktop and mobile web experiences and ensuring consistency and scalability across platforms, that was intuitive, user-friendly workflows and aligned with the company’s vision. ➜ Positive feedback directly from users on the smoother log in, faster and more private onboarding flow, and more easier to locate content throughout the app. ➜ 26% increase in WAU across web, mobile and mobile app. ➜ Reduced user errors by 30% from the usage on the mobile web and improved task completion rates. ➜ 50% increase in newsletter open rates that open directly from the website, mobile web and mobile app. ➜ Mobile app has received a 5 star rating in the App Store. Please take a look in the app store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/state-affairs/id6738106828 ### Principal UX–Product Designer @ Prosimo.io Jan 2019 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco Bay Area I was responsible for the end to end product design for solutions enabling B2B companies to utilize Zero Trust Networking Access (ZTNA) and Multi Cloud Networking (MCN) tools and capabilities for their customer’s networks. ➜ 100+ Global 2000 enterprise customers at varying degree of deployments including POC, Pilot, and Production. ➜ Designs helped move the pipeline forward from initial demo to full production. Product screens I designed are used to drive product led growth. ➜ 95%+ retention rate once a customer starts in the funnel. ➜ Enabled large enterprises migrate to the cloud in an accelerated fashion, saving $100K+ in operational costs. ➜ Simplified complex cloud networking operations into a visual driven fashion. Troubleshooting and day N operational flows transformed what used to take several hours of coordinating data between different tools and cloud provider dashboards into being accomplished in minutes. ➜ I was part of the founding team of 15 as the first UX designer. ### Senior UX–Product Designer @ Mist Systems Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area My role consisted of doing a deep dive into the product through user studies, interviews, and research with the goal of a product redesign utilizing a new design system consisting of reusable components. ➜ The focus was on integrating the AI chat bot into the user workflows. The AI chat bot used a natural language feature as well as query commands that auto-suggest text based on the retrieval system using Elasticsearch. The primary goal being to assist users in finding the most relevant information for completing networking and security tasks most efficiently though the product. ➜ Lead the UX and visual style including an entire product redesign with a new look and feel for the product's layout, typography, color, and data visualizations. ➜ Created a design system and style guide with a component library of vector artifacts for designers and developers. ➜ Successful acquisition by Juniper Networks in 2019 for $405 million. ### Senior UX–Product Designer @ GE Aerospace Jan 2013 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area GE Aerospace is a global leader in designing and manufacturing propulsion systems, aircraft engines, and related services like digital tools and control panels for both commercial and military markets. The company has a global fleet of thousands of jet engines in service worldwide. It generates the majority of its revenue from aftermarket services like maintenance, repairs, and spare-parts sales. ➜ GE Aerospace partnered with Dessault Aviation to create a fly-by-wire touchscreen flight deck control system to navigate, monitor, and control the Falcon 10X business jet. I was the UX design lead and worked with the research and product teams. I designed the wireframes and after getting approval from leadership, implemented a polished, visual design workflow and worked with the engineering team to create a fully functioning prototype that could be tested in the Falcon 10X. This resulted in 15% reduction in pilot workload, maintenance cost reduction by 20% per flight hour, and an increase in sales conversion rate for the 10X versus legacy models. ➜ Helped design and launch “Predix”, a design system aimed at providing a platform for connecting it’s industrial machines, collecting and analyzing data from these machines, and using the insights gained to improve industrial operations and maintenance. ➜ Patent Issued: System and method for monitoring a cockpit of an aircraft (Patent number: 20180312272) – https://patents.justia.com/patent/20180312272 ➜ Patent Issued: Aircraft Control System (Patent number: 10252815) – https://patents.justia.com/patent/20170345318 ### UX–Product Designer @ hoverState Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 | Greater Los Angeles Area Did a deep dive into user research, studies and interviews for updating and redesigning of Healthnet.com, the primary website for one of the largest health insurance providers. The focus was to update the look and feel with new information architecture, layout, typography, color palette, and iconography. ➜ Hoverstate was acquired by Soft Serve in 2023. ### Graphic Designer - Art Director @ Standard Black Jan 2010 – Jan 2011 Designed creative assets for integrated ad campaigns for retail, fashion, sports and entertainment brands. Focus was to create highly visual, eye catching graphics that would spread across multiple marketing channels and use consistency and strategy to convey a cohesive and impactful message that resonated with the target audience. ➜ Worked on KS10, a multimedia campaign celebrating Kelly Slater’s 10th win of the World Cup tour of Surfing, the highest level of pro surfing in the world. ➜ Other projects include: DC Shoes, Williams Sonoma, and CVS ExtraCare Beauty Club. ### Graphic Designer @ LA Freewaves Jan 2010 – Jan 2010 I was a graphic designer and front end developer for the non profit arts organization Freewaves. We helped artists get noticed and have their work displayed on our platform. ➜ Help curate and produce "Freewaves - Videos on the Loose" Freewaves' 20th anniversary at the LACMA Late Night Art Event. The event included 20+ experimental media art works produced over the previous 2 decades. ➜ Updated website content, copy, images on website. ➜ Designed pages by handcoding HTML and CSS. ➜ Updated and organized video archive database. ### Web Designer @ Otis College of Art and Design Jan 2009 – Jan 2010 I updated the design and layouts for the website using Flash, HTML and CSS. ➜ Update website content, copy, images, and video in the CMS using HTML, CSS, and Dreamweaver. ➜ Encode videos for web format. ### Graphic Designer Advertising @ Guess Jan 2008 – Jan 2010 Worked as a graphic designer in the GUESS? advertising department with 3 other designers, and creative director and founder Paul Marciano. We were responsible for creating seasonal fashion catalogs and keeping the world famous GUESS? advertising look and authenticity intact. ➜ Creative Lead for original artwork for GUESS? Factory shopping bag which is still used today. ## Education ### Bachelor of Fine Arts in Communication Arts with emphasis in Graphic Design Otis College of Art and Design ### Bachelor of Arts in Sociology Sophia University ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/masaakiyama - Portfolio: https://www.masaakiyama.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/masaki JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/masaki/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-13