Abbott President’s Award
Presented by CEO Robert B. Ford for leadership contribution to NAVICA.
Olya Androsik · Product Design & Research Leader
Product design and DesignOps leader — fifteen years shipping regulated, measured systems; now an independent researcher on how AI products earn human trust.
Calm, evidence-led design leadership for products people rely on.
I lead the work from customer insight to product decisions, and build the teams and standards that carry it forward. Across consumer commerce, mobile experiences and complex enterprise platforms, I help people understand what is happening, act with confidence and come back because the product is useful.
Selected recognition
Featured in Forbes
Forbes reported that Home Depot's simplified online checkout cut customers' process time by 20% on average; I led the one-page checkout experience design.
Read the coverage ↗Conference Speaker — ADVATERA
Speaker on design leadership and design operations for European digital leaders.
Speaker profile ↗U.S. Design Patents — Co-Inventor
Six U.S. design patents on the NAVICA Health Pass interface, assigned to Abbott Laboratories.
Patent D958,819 ↗Patent D959,468 ↗Patent D959,469 ↗Patent D961,607 ↗Patent D976,949 ↗Patent D977,510 ↗The record, in numbers
15+years in product design, research & operations
+23%checkout conversion at The Home Depot
22designers led across six time zones at Abbott
160+person design org served by the DesignOps Office at Wayfair
Where I’ve worked
Enterprise scale, regulated stakes, household names.
Abbott LaboratoriesWayfairThe Home DepotAT&TCBREJCPenney × SephoraArriveOne TechnologiesBrady UXUX Design Lab
Selected work
The decisions behind the outcomes.
The customer problem, the research that informed it, the decisions I made with my partners, and what changed as a result.
Product design · Responsible engagement
2023–2025FIRST90 · Brady UX
My role: Head of Product Design; DesignOps, Strategy & Ethical AI · Onboarding, micro-learning & daily engagement
Helping daily learning build momentum through visible progress and supportive feedback, with autonomy and accessibility built into the interaction model.
25% reported improvement in 30-day engagementAccessible keyboard-operable progress & feedback
Design operations · Organizational leadership
2021–2023Wayfair · DesignOps Office
My role: Senior Manager, Product Design & Design Operations · 160+ person design organization · 40+ practice guides
Led Design Operations for a 160+ person product design organization — governance, practice standards, career architecture, research operations, and tooling strategy: the function whose product is the design team itself.
15% less time spent on design projects30% decrease in development effort$257K annual savings from retiring the old toolchain
Healthcare · Product & program leadership
2020–2021NAVICA · Abbott Laboratories
My role: Design Program Delivery Owner · Five-product ecosystem · 22 designers · six time zones
From a blank brief to a national COVID-19 testing platform: connecting the realities of clinical work with the operating conditions for a distributed design team.
5 connected products in one service22 designers led across six time zones at Abbott10K → 100K daily users, two weeks after launch to Sprint 10
Healthcare AI · Proof of concept
2019 · five weeksOVA · Abbott Laboratories
My role: Design direction & concept leadership · AI-assisted IVF support · clinician & data-scientist partnership
A five-week exploration of AI-assisted support during IVF, shaped with clinicians and data scientists and kept within the boundaries of a proof of concept.
5 weeks proof-of-concept developmentCross-disciplinary clinicians, data scientists & design
E-commerce · UX strategy & interaction design
2016–2018The Home Depot · Checkout
My role: Senior UX Architect · Accounts, cart, checkout & Save for Later
Simplifying a high-volume purchase journey through a one-page checkout and a way to preserve shopping intent when customers were not ready to buy.
+23% reported checkout conversion+15% reported revenue from Save for Later−20% checkout time, as cited by Forbes
E-commerce · Research & interaction design
2015Sephora × JCPenney · Beauty Insider
My role: UX designer, researcher & integration lead · Rewards, samples, account access & checkout
Connecting Beauty Insider rewards to JCPenney’s shopping journey, with alternative flows and testing that made the design decisions visible.
12% → 46% sign-in/up engagement across compared flows42% → 63% sample engagement across compared flows30% → 22% skip rate across compared flows
Career arc
From craft to systems: each role widened the circle.
UX Design Lab, LLC — Director of Design Operations & UX Strategy
Remote from Valencia, Spain
DesignOps and UX strategy across product design, accessibility governance, and AI-ready transformation. Research, testing and application of the Team Capability Engine, an analytics framework for growing design teams, delivered as a consulting service.
Brady UX — Co-Founder; Head of Design Operations, Strategy & Ethical AI
Eight-plus AI-focused client engagements
Built a practice around responsible AI product work. FIRST90, an AI-enhanced onboarding product, reports an improvement in 30-day engagement of 25% — with explainability, recovery, and human accountability designed in.
Wayfair — Senior Manager, Product Design & Design Operations
Led Design Operations · 160+ person design org · led 15+ designers, managers, partners
Led governance and practice across hiring, onboarding, tools, education, and 40+ practice guides. An internal B2B redesign cut business expense 20% and lifted service efficiency 15% within a year.
Abbott Laboratories — Manager, Global Design Operations
Up to 22 designers · six time zones · consumer & enterprise users in regulated healthcare
Built the global DesignOps practice and stewarded a shared design system across 15 country sites that reduced design and development debt by 30%. Helped lead NAVICA from rapid discovery to launch, and worked as the enterprise tooling subject-matter expert with Adobe XD’s product team in 2018–2019, shaping functionality for Abbott’s enterprise rollout.
Arrive — Senior Product Designer / Design Lead
Led six UX resources · desktop, mobile web & native apps · partner integrations
End-to-end redesign of the consumer parking experience across desktop, mobile web and apps, including the integrations that connected partner parking inventory to the booking journey.
The Home Depot · AT&T · CBRE · One Technologies · JCPenney/Sephora
Senior UX Architect and product design roles — IC to people manager
Owned account, cart, and checkout at Home Depot — the one-page checkout lifted conversion 23%, and Save for Later increased revenue by 15% among customers using saved items in the first two weeks. Research, testing and redesign of iOS and Android consumer-credit products at One Technologies: +32% mobile engagement, +20% conversion. The JCPenney iOS rewards work reported 11% greater enrollment and 15.84% greater account linking. Telecom and commercial real estate engagements at AT&T and CBRE built the cross-industry judgment the later leadership roles ran on.
The research years · 2023 — present
What fifteen years of shipping taught me — and what I think comes next.
When I left the corporate environment, I didn't leave the work — I went to study the question it kept raising. Every program I'd led, from a national health platform to a 160-person design org, ran into the same wall from a different angle: interfaces were being built faster than the humans using them could metabolize. Auro Prism is the practice I built to take that question seriously — read, research, write, test — with the time and independence a VP calendar never allows.
What I've concluded — from experience, not theory
Interfaces are cognitive environments
My working conclusion, argued at length in the UTDA white paper: most of what we call UX failure isn't bad craft — it's dimensional incoherence, visual density, motion, pacing, and semantic load stacking past what a nervous system can regulate. NAVICA taught me this under the highest stakes; the research years gave me the framework for it. A corollary I hold with some confidence because I've watched it play out: design that treats neurodivergent tolerance as the baseline produces systems that work better for everyone.
Where I think this goes — an expectation, not a manifesto
Trust becomes the product
As AI takes over more of the decisioning, I expect the scarce resource to shift from features to trust — and trust, in my experience, is an interaction property: visible reasoning, an obvious way back, a human clearly accountable. The teams that treat human cognition as a design constraint, the way engineers treat physics, will quietly outperform the ones chasing engagement. I could be wrong about the timeline. I don't think I'm wrong about the direction — I've been designing for the professionals who feel this pressure first.
The practice's instruments · auroprism.com
UTDA · Prism Pulse · the Doctrine
UTDA — a unified theory of dimensional aesthetics, written to academic rigor and currently in its consolidation revision (fourteen doctrines becoming nine, with an empirical scaffolding program behind it). Prism Pulse explores translating UX, accessibility, and system signals into prioritized human-readable action without removing judgment. The Doctrine is the short form: regulation before engagement, predictability before personalization, safety before efficiency.
Consulting framework · UX Design Lab
Team Capability Engine (TCE)
Research, testing, and application of the Team Capability Engine methodology by Pavel (Designer of Thought) — an analytics framework that makes design-team skills, alignment, and growth visible through capability diagnostics, mentorship pathways, and evidence-based team development, delivered as a consulting service for design organizations. Execution stops being a guessing game.
Explore the practice ↗Capabilities
What I bring to a design organization.
Leadership
Design org building · hiring & coaching · career frameworks · executive facilitation · distributed teams · change leadership
Practice
DesignOps · ResearchOps · product strategy · discovery · design systems · service design · accessibility governance · UX metrics
AI & systems
Responsible AI patterns · human-in-the-loop workflows · explainability & recovery · AI-assisted research and prototyping · complex B2B SaaS
Off the clock: an aspiring boulderer, a passionate mountaineer, and a baker — born in Minsk, raised in Baltimore, now watching the light change over Valencia.