About Me
I'm a product designer who's spent the last 3+ years making fintech feel less like fintech — turning dense compliance flows, multi-currency infrastructure, and enterprise tooling into experiences people can actually use.
I care a lot about design systems, information architecture, and the boring work of making things consistent.
Now I'm freelancing, currently redesigning the analytics experience for Arbitrack.
I focus on clarity, consistency, and craft — designing interfaces that feel intuitive because the hard thinking happened before the pixels. My work is grounded in systems thinking, shaped by Laws of UX and design principles, and built with a strong foundation in SaaS web and mobile.
Most design work lives at the feature level — one flow, one interaction, one screen. I tend to zoom out first. Before I touch a frame, I want to understand what system the user is navigating: how the information relates, where decisions compound, where the model breaks down. That instinct shows up in everything from IA to token naming. It's why I gravitate toward design systems work, and why the things I build tend to scale without falling apart.
I've spent most of my career at the seam between design, engineering, and product. I can read a technical constraint and translate it into a design decision. I can take a business requirement from a VP and turn it into a user problem worth solving. That back-and-forth is where I do my best work — not because I compromise, but because I've built enough shared vocabulary with each discipline to move between them without losing context.
- Established and owned RYVYL's design system end-to-end — token architecture, component library, and cross-team documentation — serving a design org of 8+ across three product lines.
- Mentored a junior designer through their first quarter, running weekly pairing sessions on complex flows and reviewing their work until they could operate independently.
- Regularly presented design decisions to executive stakeholders and cross-functional leads — translating design rationale into business and engineering terms without losing the nuance.
- Built and ran an independent Amazon and Walmart arbitrage business end-to-end — product sourcing, inventory management, repricing strategy, and financial tracking — developing SOPs from scratch that systematized operations across multiple product categories.
- Managed multiple contract workers — delegating tasks, maintaining quality standards, and coordinating across ongoing operations.
"Allen thinks about design at the system level in a way that's rare. He'd catch inconsistencies across three different product areas and then fix them in a way that made each individual flow better — not just more consistent. Every team I've seen him work with trusts him almost immediately."
"What makes Allen stand out is how he handles constraints. He never treats an engineering limitation as a design problem — he uses it to make a sharper decision. Working with him felt collaborative in the way design–engineering collaboration rarely does."
"Allen brought structure to a design process that badly needed it. He shipped the design system almost single-handedly, but more importantly, he got buy-in from teams that had never agreed on anything visual before. That's the harder part — and he made it look easy."