Hi, I'm Darlena!

Besides being an avid video gamer and music junkie, I'm a product designer with user research, interaction, and visual design skills. The marriage of these three skills has helped me successfully solve problems for a diverse range of industries.

Here's an overview of my design career: After studying Human-Computer Interaction at Rice University in Texas, I started as a visual designer at PROS building enterprise SaaS products for Fortune 500 companies. I then moved to the Bay Area to work at Disqus as one of two product designers on a social commenting platform for over a billion users worldwide. After that, I designed and launched a crypto collectible mobile app in partnership with Crunchyroll as the sole designer. Currently, I'm mentoring UI/UX design students at Springboard, a bootcamp for designers, engineers, and data scientists.

Design Philosophy

I want to help people save time and allow them to spend that spare time on what they truly enjoy. Inspired by the theory that cooking made us human (I'm a bit biased since I love to cook), I think that humans have always strived to make mundane, repetitive tasks more efficient so that they can spend their time on more interesting things. As humans, we've accomplished so many breakthroughs in the name of efficiency dating all the way back to the invention of cooking, the advent of the assembly line, and more. I think it's pretty awesome that being a designer grants me the opportunity to be a part of this story and spend my days inventing and innovating. In particular, I'm interested in how we can leverage new technologies to creatively problem solve.

Contact Me

I'd love to hear from you!
Send me an email at hello@darlenatran.com