# Michael Angeles > I’m a builder—a UX & Product Designer who designs & ships working prototypes with Claude Code on products that customers love. I’m available for design consulting, UX audits, and workshops on AI-assisted design. DM me. Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/michaelangeles Senior UX design leader with 20+ years driving product strategy and design for creative tools. Led UX at Balsamiq, where I shaped the design direction for wireframing software used by over 2 million customers worldwide, including the shaping of vibe design features. I specialize in designing intuitive interfaces for complex technical products, with a unique combination of deep design expertise and hands-on development capability. I'm an early adopter of vibe coding and AI-assisted development—using tools like Claude Code, Google Gemini, Bolt.new and Figma Make to rapidly prototype and ship production-ready products. This allows me to move fluidly from strategic vision to working code, compressing traditional design-to-development cycles from weeks to days. Key Impact: - Led UX strategy for Balsamiq's product evolution across desktop and cloud platforms - Co-authored "Wireframing for Everyone" (published by A Book Apart), establishing best practices adopted by design teams globally - Managed and mentored distributed UX team, fostering a culture of user research and iterative design - Pioneered rapid design ideation methodologies now standard across the design tools industry - Shipped multiple production applications using AI-assisted development workflows, demonstrating the future of design-developer collaboration (Motivist.app, TheDJKit.com, Flyr.Studio) Currently exploring: How AI transforms the entire product development lifecycle—from ideation to production deployment. I'm focused on the intersection of AI design assistance, conversational interfaces, and vibe coding as a new paradigm for designer-developers. Technical Approach: I bridge the gap between design vision and technical implementation. My workflow combines traditional UX fundamentals (information architecture, interaction design, user research) with modern AI-enhanced development practices. I prototype in production-quality code, ensuring designs are not only beautiful but technically feasible and performant. Speaking & Thought Leadership: Presented at SXSW, IXDA NYC, Los Alamos National Laboratory, DrupalCon, and published in Boxes and Arrows, Library Journal. Co-founder and advisor to the Information Architecture Institute. I'm passionate about building products that empower creators, removing friction from the design process while maintaining the craft and intentionality that defines great UX. The future of product design isn't just designing for AI—it's designing with AI as a collaborative partner. ## Work Experience ### UX Designer @ Google via PRPL @ Purple Rock Scissors • A Strategic Creative Agency Jan 2025 – Jan 2026 Supporting the User Experience design for GeminiUX ### Senior Product Design Lead @ Balsamiq Jan 2010 – Jan 2025 Led UX design direction for Balsamiq Wireframes, used by 1.4M+ designers at companies including Posthog, OpenAI, GitLab, and _zapier. • Drove product vision from concept through execution, balancing business objectives with user needs across web, desktop (Mac and Windows), and cloud platforms. • Managed and mentored distributed design team including user research, usability testing, design and product management. • Collaborated cross-functionally with engineering, product management, and customer success to ship features that measurably improve user workflows. • Led the strategic initiatives including the design of AI-powered features for "vibe design" and continuous improvement/re-alignment and redesign over the 15 years on the product. • Led the execution and communication of interaction and visual design from creating system-wide wireflows and wireframes to building prototypes in Bolt.new in short cycles (hours to days). • Pioneered AI-assisted design explorations, researching how intelligent suggestions can accelerate the wireframing process without replacing designer judgment, and contributing prompts and heuristics for AI evals. • Authored design playbooks and built multiple enterprise GPTs to enable UX and Development teams to find answers to design questions, evaluate their solutions, and shape pitches using an AI Assistant trained on content that I created including design system, playbooks, articles and my book "Wireframing for Everyone." ### Director of User Experience @ Traction Software Jan 2008 – Jan 2010 Led user interface and visual design direction for TeamPage, an enterprise knowledge management and collaboration platform serving Fortune 500 companies. • Redesigned the interaction and information architecture of the product's flexible navigation and content management interface, enabling teams to manage complex enterprise workflows and content retrieval in large organizations ranging from business to intelligence. • Established user-centered and iterative design practices in an engineering-led culture. • Collaborated with engineering and product teams to balance technical constraints with user needs in a sophisticated enterprise SaaS environment. ### Information Architect @ Sling TV Jan 2007 – Jan 2008 User experience design on Sling TV's Sling.com social video platform, an application developed for clipping ands sharing media in a social media experience for TV. • Led system-wide design specifications for both the creator and viewer experiences. • Standardized the design specification system and the design vocabulary based on the wireframing templates that I developed (which were acquired by OmniGroup for Omnigraffle). • Led Usability Testing of product prototypes locally in NYC and SF which included creating prototypes, recruiting participants, writing test plan, creating screener surveys, facilitating test sessions, reporting and company-wide presentation. ### Information Architect & Front End Developer @ Lucent Technologies Bell Labs innovations Jan 1998 – Jan 2007 Led design for Bell Labs information services organization working on information architecture, interaction design and user interface design for Lucent Intranet and Internet web sites. • Led concept development, information architecture (information organization and user interface development), and site development (graphic design and production, front-end code, and scripting in Javascript and Perl). ### Senior Site Developer @ Sapient Corporation Jan 2000 – Jan 2000 | New York, New York, United States Front-end development for business, marketing and IT consulting firm. • Web technology leadership within client project teams and mentored site developers. • Worked on developing functional specifications and executing them in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. • Worked with the technical team through the integration of code and other user experience elements into the technology framework. Work with other team members to provide guidance and leadership for the site development team throughout the project lifecycle. ## Education ### MLS in Library and Information Science Rutgers University School of Communication and Information ### BA in Art History, Cinema Studies Rutgers University–New Brunswick ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/michaelangeles - Portfolio: https://michaelangeles.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/michaelangeles JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/michaelangeles/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-13