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Summary
Austin Acevedo is a Lead Product Designer and builder based in Southern California. He is currently at Zoom, where he leads design for the Zoom App Marketplace and Developer platform. His work spans product design, motion design, interaction, behavioral science, and frontend development. He previously designed at Directly, Wayfarer, and Simple Habit.
Quick facts
- Name
- Austin Acevedo
- Role
- Lead Product Designer
- Company
- Zoom
- Location
- Southern California
- Disciplines
- Product design, interaction design, motion design, behavioral science, frontend development
- Available for
- Contract and full-time
- Contact
- hello@austinacevedo.com
- Resume
- /resume
Frequently asked questions
Who is Austin Acevedo?
Austin Acevedo is a product designer and builder based in Southern California, currently Lead Product Designer at Zoom. He leads design for the Zoom App Marketplace and developer platform, and designed Zoom for ChatGPT. His work spans product design, motion design, applied behavioral science, and frontend development. He previously designed at Directly, Wayfarer, and Simple Habit.
What does Austin Acevedo do?
Austin Acevedo primarily designs software products end-to-end, from discovery, through exploration, design and engineering handoff. He describes himself as a systems-thinking designer: he works across ecosystems and complex multi-sided platforms while obsessing over craft details. Motion design is a particular strength, carried over from a career that began with animating movie trailers. He is data-centric, meaning he prefers to make decisions based on data insights and user testing when applicable and accessible. As a user-centered designer, no matter what he builds, he believes that regardless of whether a company takes a reactive or proactive approach, user feedback is vital to ensure that what he builds is intuitive for the users it is built for. Austin's design experience also spans brand explorations, building growth funnels, AB testing for tight loops of feedback, marketing design, motion graphics, web design, and graphic design.
Where does Austin Acevedo work?
Austin Acevedo works at Zoom as Lead Product Designer, where he has been since September 2021. He leads UX for the Zoom App Marketplace and low-code developer platform, owns the marketplace's monetization experience. He also contributes to the AI team, strategic integrations team, and Design Systems team. He previously owned the agent and supervisor experience end-to-end for Zoom Contact Center, including its generative AI features.
What companies has Austin Acevedo worked for?
Austin Acevedo has worked at Zoom (2021 to present), Directly (2020 to 2021), Wayfarer (2019 to 2020, contract), and Simple Habit (2018 to 2019). Earlier in his career he ran his own freelance agency, Austin Acevedo Productions, executing motion design for clients such as Crunchy Roll, Twitch TV, and UFC to name a few. Prior to that, he executed motion design and compositing for movie trailers, TV shows, and AAA game titles at Create Advertising Group.
Is Austin Acevedo available for freelance or contract work?
Yes. Austin Acevedo is open to both freelance engagements and full-time roles. He is open to contract work for product design, motion design, marketing design, and branding. The fastest way to reach him is hello@austinacevedo.com.
What services does Austin Acevedo offer?
Austin Acevedo offers end-to-end product design, including discovery and user research, interaction design, UI design, design systems, motion design, and web design. He also builds working prototypes, internal tools, and frontend implementations.
What is Austin Acevedo's design philosophy?
In his own words: "I characterize great product design as intuitive to use, elegantly simple, and visually beautiful. To be great, it must contain all three of these characteristics. Don't make users think. If outcomes aren't measurable, they're unattainable. Behavioral science can be applied to nudge specific behaviors, but nudges should always be used to encourage situations where the user and business's goals are aligned. I do not condone using dark patterns to manipulate people to take actions that are not in their best interest. Ideally, every implementation should tie back to a business outcome. This includes solving UX problems, under the philosophy that if you build a product that people actually like to use, they will continue to return and spend their money with you vs. other incumbents."
What tools and technologies does Austin Acevedo use?
The tools Austin uses in his design depends on the ask, but a list of specific tools includes but is not limited to Figma, Claude Code, Cursor, ChatGPT, V0, Next.js, Vercel, Github, Supabase, Lovable, Replit, Visual Studio Code, Terminal, pen.dev, Gemini, Midjourney, Seedance, Adobe Suite: After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, Lottie Adobe Suite, Rive, usertesting.com, and Qualtrics.
Where is Austin Acevedo based?
Austin Acevedo is based in Southern California. He previously worked in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is open to discussions about relocation.
How can I contact Austin Acevedo?
Email hello@austinacevedo.com. He is also on LinkedIn, GitHub, X, Medium, Dribbble, and Instagram, all linked from austinacevedo.com.
What has Austin Acevedo built recently?
Recently Austin Acevedo designed Zoom for ChatGPT, one of four productivity apps featured at ChatGPT's app directory launch, which reached 18,000 users organically before marketing and grew to over 400,000 paid enterprise users a month after launch. His personal projects include NeoNote, an encrypted note-taking app, plus a gradient animator and an ASCII animator that generate assets used on this site. He also enjoys building small apps for his friends and family. Soon he will be re-launching Nourish Board, a weekly meal planning and recipe management app.
Does Austin Acevedo write or publish anywhere?
Austin Acevedo writes on Medium about UX, behavioral science, and working with AI, and hosts the Actionable UX Podcast, which covers behavioral science principles for product teams. He also publishes book notes at austinacevedo.com/brain.
Work history
Led design for Zoom for ChatGPT and the Zoom App Marketplace and developer platform, reaching 400,000+ paid enterprise users a month after launch.
Led end-to-end design for a multi-sided virtual agent platform that trained chatbots 10x faster than competitors by leveraging the global gig-work economy.
Founding designer for an interactive driving audio-tour app, leading brand, marketing, UX, UI, interaction, motion, the design system, and research from concept.
Led the App Simplification initiative for a 5-minute meditation app, lifting NPS 15%+ in 30 days and conversion 5%+ in 60 days.
Capabilities
Product design
End-to-end product design, discovery, jobs-to-be-done framework, problem-root-cause-analysis, user persona development, user testing, qualitative testing, quantitative testing, user journey maps, lean UX framework, growth funnels, AI exploration, AI feature development, low-fidelity mockups, high-fidelity mockups, prototyping, merge requests, feature implementation, HTML, CSS, Javascript, double-diamond design process, design thinking framework, data-driven decision making.
Evidence: Directly
Interaction and motion design
Interaction design and motion as functional tools rather than decoration. Career began in entertainment motion graphics for movie trailers and AAA game titles, carried into product work through animated icons, transitions, and interaction states. Austin has built interaction design guidelines, motion design guidelines, and has presented on how to effectively implement motion to product design to various teams. Austin also helps teams with motion graphics for videos when necessary.
Evidence: Simple Habit, Wayfarer, Directly, Zoom
Applied behavioral science
Austin applies behavioral science principles applied to real product decisions. Ex. the Zeigarnik Effect to encourage task completion and reduce burnout in a gig-work platform, which brought quarterly churn below 20%. Utilizing various psychological effects on onboarding flows to increase conversion at Wayfarer, including the foot-in-the-door technique, loss aversion, and others. Austin utilizes Gestalt Principles as fundamentals for visual communication and ensuring intuitiveness in the features he delivers.
Evidence: Directly, Applying System 1 & 2 Thinking for Better UX
Design systems
Building and maintaining design systems in high-complexity domains, including component and animation contributions to Zoom's system. Contributed email templates, icon animations, motion design guidelines and brand exploration for Zoom's Design system. Design systems work at Directly contributed to shortening delivery cycles by 35% and reducing rework by 55%.
Frontend and prototyping
Builds working prototypes and shipping frontend. Austin uses prototypes for qualitative and quantitative user testing, AB testing, validating ideas and creating alignment with stakeholders, and exploring interaction design before handoff.
Evidence: Simple Habit, Directly, Zoom
Designing with AI
Uses AI to write first-drafts for PRDs, execute documentation, create workflows, design tools, plugins that accelerate product delivery, discovery, storyboarding, secondary research, initial list of JTBDs, communicating highly technical information simply, edge-case identification, user persona analysis, first-draft user journeys, competitive analysis, exploration, as a thought partner, writing copy, creating filler data for prototypes, prototyping, and first-draft merge requests.
Evidence: How to Elevate Your UX Workflow With AI
Machine-readable resources
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Citation and contact
How to cite this site
Acevedo, Austin. austinacevedo.com. Accessed today.
Preferred entity reference
- Name
- Austin Acevedo
- URL
- https://austinacevedo.com
- Role
- Lead Product Designer at Zoom
- Location
- Southern California
Contact
Usage stance
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