Daniel Mejia
Senior Product Designer
About Me
Hi, I'm Daniel Mejia, a Senior Product Designer with 10+ years of experience designing enterprise software for regulated industries. My career has focused on complex systems and high-stakes workflows, supporting users in financial services, legal teams, and business resiliency at JPMorgan Chase and PNC Bank, as well as in education at McGraw-Hill.
My work extends beyond interface design. In most projects, I have led discovery efforts without a dedicated UX researcher. I facilitate cross-functional whiteboarding sessions with business, product, engineering, and stakeholders to define user flows, align on information architecture, and identify integration dependencies before development. I map information architecture to backend systems and databases, inform API planning, and help teams address key issues before design begins. This approach ensures solutions are grounded in how the system functions, not just how it appears.
Three experiences outside of design shaped how I think. Working in my family's business built an instinct for listening to people and understanding their needs and wants. Studying art history at the University of Puerto Rico taught me to read visual systems carefully, articulate why design decisions work, and understand design as a form of communication with real consequences. Serving as an intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army trained me to quickly synthesize ambiguous information, identify the relevant pattern, and make a clear recommendation in the face of uncertainty. I use all three every time I walk into a discovery session or a design review.
If you're developing complex enterprise products, especially in regulated or high-risk environments, and need a designer who addresses the entire problem—not just the UI layer, I'd love to connect.
How I Work
I start with the system before I start with the screen.
Before a wireframe gets drawn, I need to understand how the product fits into the larger system — what data it depends on, which teams own it, and what has to be true in the backend before the UI can work. I use structured whiteboarding sessions to get there, bringing together business, product, engineering, and stakeholders to map user flows, define information architecture, and surface integration dependencies. The screen is the last thing I design, not the first.
Accessibility isn't a checklist — it's a design constraint I build around from the start.
I treat WCAG compliance and accessible design patterns the same way I treat any other product requirement: as something that shapes decisions early, not something that gets reviewed at the end. I've co-created accessibility documentation, mentored other designers on A11y standards, and designed accessible communication templates for product releases. If a design isn't accessible, it isn't finished.
My Figma files are designed for the people who use them, not just the people who make them.
Engineers shouldn't have to hunt for specs. Product managers shouldn't need a guide to find last week's feature. I treat file organization as a design problem — named layers, logical structure, annotated components, and tables of contents that let anyone navigate a file without asking me for help. A well-organized file is a form of respect for the people downstream.
I design for the handoff, not just the review.
A design that looks great in a presentation but confuses engineers in implementation isn't a finished design. I stay involved through development — answering questions, clarifying edge cases, and making sure what gets built matches what was intended. I've learned enough about how engineers read design files, plan APIs, and configure systems that I can meet them where they are rather than waiting for them to come to me.
I leave teams better equipped than I found them.
Whether it's a Figma tutorial for an engineering team, accessibility documentation for future designers, a style guide that lets junior designers work independently, or a table of contents that saves a product manager ten minutes of searching — I build resources that outlast the project. Good design work creates artifacts. Great design work creates capabilities.
Experience
PNC Bank
Senior Experience Designer · Columbus, OHDesigning enterprise banking products on a lean team — leading design reviews, consolidating files into navigable sources of truth, and partnering with BAs, PMs, and IT to translate complex requirements into accessible, user-centered specs.
JPMorgan Chase — Business Resiliency
Senior UX/UI Designer · Columbus, OHDesigned mission-critical tools for enterprise recovery and compliance workflows — including a recovery process builder, a scheduling and test management tool, and a multi-status approval workflow with integrated messaging. Led cross-functional whiteboarding sessions mapping IA to multiple data sources and informing API planning before development began. Implemented Adobe Analytics across the application and surfaced a key insight that corrected a foundational product assumption.
JPMorgan Chase — Legal Department
Senior UX/UI Designer · Columbus, OHLead designer for Legal Data Central and multiple new product initiatives — end-to-end ownership from discovery through delivery. Filled the UX research gap by facilitating whiteboarding sessions, mapping IA to backend systems, and informing API and and Kafka configuration. Introduced Figma prototyping as the standard for usability testing and partnered with researchers to produce journey maps, experience maps, and synthesis decks.
McGraw-Hill Education
Designer · Columbus, OHBuilt a style guide and reusable HTML/CSS component library that standardized design across print and digital platforms, enabling 5 junior designers to work independently. Designed and tested an interactive math product prototype with teachers, and was selected for a leadership task force to accelerate a product redesign supporting the national sales effort.
DESIGNATION
UX/UI Designer · Chicago, ILEducation
Human-Computer Interaction for UX Design Certification
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), OnlineUX/UI Design Bootcamp
DESIGNATION Labs, Chicago, ILGraphic Design Associate of Science (AS)
The Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, Fort Lauderdale, FLArt History Bachelor’s Degree (BA)
Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, PRIntelligence Analyst (96B) Specialized Training
US Army, Fort Huachuca, AZContact
Location
Columbus, OH