Hello! I’m Alejandra.
Welcome to my portfolio.
I'm a UX Researcher and Graphic Designer based in Barcelona.
I research human needs and design solutions around them.
I start with people.
Most projects start with the problem. I start earlier: locating what users need, even if they don’t have the words to name it yet. That research defines the design challenge.
I've done it where it's hardest.
15 years across entrepreneurship, social impact design, and NGO work (including 5 years researching and designing for activists, human rights defenders, and communities operating under political risk across 19 countries). That context doesn't leave your practice.
I understand how research connects to product decisions.
PM-trained and certified. I know how features get prioritised, how roadmaps get built, and how to frame a research finding so it changes what gets built, not just what gets reported.
A decade and a half of projects that shaped me. Get to know them.
Service Design & Research (2015 - 2025)
Inspiratorio’s Learning Experience (2020-25)
Service design for a training platform for Latin American activists operating under high stress, high expectations, and the weight of real-stakes work. The challenge: Design an accessible online experience where users could feel safe enough to learn and experiment with an innovative approach.
OYE! (2016-22)
[Entrepreneurship] Service design for an online community serving people who believed in gender equality but rejected the feminist movement. The challenge: Design a behavior change experience that meets people where they actually are (not where activists want them to be).
Let Yourself Go! (2015)
[Service Design Master’s Final Project] Product discovery for a platform seeking to help young Latin American women navigate sexual health information. Spoiler alert: The barrier wasn't access. It was shame.
→ Project page coming soon
Web design for online marketing (2021 - 2022)
Conversations in Movement: Dialogues for a Shared Space (2022)
A landing page designed to recruit participants for an 11-session online conference on inclusive communication and cultural change. Produced by Inspiratorio.
CommsLab: The Art of Storytelling (2021)
A landing page designed to recruit participants for a storytelling workshop. Produced by Inspiratorio.
CommsLab: Behavior Design for Social Change (2021)
A landing page designed to recruit participants for a hands-on theoretical workshop exploring how behavior sciences can be leveraged for social change. Produced by Inspiratorio.
Product Thinking (2025)
The AI was wrong. The product said nothing. (2025)
[PM Bootcamp Final Project] An independent PM case study on what it would take for ChatGPT Plus users who were churning due to hallucinations to come back. The finding: they did not want a perfect LLM; they wanted the product that wouldn’t leave them alone with the consequences of imperfection.
Now take a look at my early career work 🐣
Brand strategy and visual identity (2013 - 2019)
GuoquiToqui (2013)
An educational children's content studio with bigger ambitions than their brand was communicating. The design challenge was building an identity flexible enough to hold both: joyful children's programming and documentaries about Colombian social problems told with humor.
Plan9Media (2013)
A production studio tired of needing personal connections to get commissions. The brief was to build a brand strong enough to do the talking. The answer was "master storytellers": a positioning built around what only they could claim.
Raiz Mestiza - Lili del Sol (2019)
Lili del Sol is a Colombian musician based in Valencia, Spain. Her “Raíz Mestiza” album is an exploration of both Latin American music and her own identity. The album artwork was designed as an explorer’s log of her journey into her Colombian and Latin American roots, using collage as a metaphor for "mestizaje" (cultural mixing).
Personal Initiatives (2011 - 2015)
ReCrea (2011-12)
Co-founded an advocacy collective of Colombian digital artists whose livelihoods were threatened by copyright legislation that didn't know the difference between theft and remix. We took the argument to Congress.
→ See the website on the WayBackMachine
→Congress coverage
→ Media coverage
Ugh! del Futuro (2013-15)
I founded a branding studio and civic design lab for the creative sector, held together by one argument: frustration with your city is only useful if you do something about it.
→ Read a report from one of the civic experiments:A street intervention that transformed drivers' frustration with Bogotá's road conditions into calls for both political change and personal preparedness.
333 Mermeladas (2014)
A crowdfunding project built to fund a transatlantic move. Concept, production, identity, photography, and sales were entirely in-house. We hit the target.
Explore my user research skills.
Explore case studies that reveal how I move from research to design. 👇
About me
I grew up in a city and country that everyone kept saying was broken: Bogotá, Colombia. While in university studying graphic design (2006-2009), social media arrived, and suddenly an entire generation was using the internet to demand something better. Occupy Wall Street. Los Indignados. The Arab Spring. In Colombia, the “One million voices against FARC” mobilization. I was inspired. I started exploring how design could support social change.
The answer started to form in an unlikely place: advertising. While working as a planner, I learned the role psychology plays in how marketers persuade us to do one thing over another. I then found the First Things First Manifesto, a manifesto written by British graphic designer Ken Garland in 1964 that argued that the greatest effort of those working in design was being wasted on consumer noise. Designers shape how we interact with the world, and there were better things worth using those skills for. I've never stopped believing that.
Fifteen years and a service design master’s degree later, I'm still asking the same question I asked in my 20s: if we're going to use design to influence how people behave, what's worth doing it for? That question has taken me from branding to NGO work, from behaviour change research to learning experience design, from Bogotá to Barcelona.
The discipline changes. The question hasn't.
Now I’m setting my aims at the tech sector and AI-powered products, especially those with edge cases affecting vulnerable users.