Gurwinder Virk

Senior Product Designer

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4 Years of Experience

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Toronto, ON

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Senior Product Designer // 4 Years of Experience // Toronto, ON //

Experience

  • Founding member of Blue Labs, Walmart Canada’s first-ever innovation incubator and accelerator team.

    • Led 7 projects from initial research to testing phase, resulting in 2 of them being successfully integrated into the core Walmart business, 3 being successfully terminated, and 2 still being validated.

    • Built complex, data-informed user flows, journeys, JTBDs, personas, wireframes, and prototypes derived by extensive collaboration with researchers, strategy team, engineers, external partners, and executives.

    • Mentored and trained UX Design interns

  • • Helped a client increase their revenue by 250%, through a combination of digital strategies, including a website.

    • Built a user-friendly website for a client that generated a 100% ROI in the first month.

    • Developed brand identities, websites, and strategies that helped companies accelerate their growth and generate more leads.

  • • Updated the User Onboarding Flow, which led to a 30s decrease in time required to complete account creation and membership purchase.

    • Identified critical user pain points through research in the form of surveys and interviews, and designed solutions to solve them.

    • Owned the end-to-end design process (including journey mapping, information architecture, wireframing, and prototyping) for numerous major UX projects, including but not limited to: Homepage Overhaul, SPCxCIBC Page, App Redesign, and SPC Chrome Extension.

  • • Designed the user experience of the company's new e-commerce website, which launched in February 2021 and currently generates an estimated of $10,000/day.

    • Created a multitude of Marketing collaterals, from print to digital, by strictly adhering to the brand guidelines, while still deploying a high degree of creativity and showcasing the knowledge of design fundamentals (such as typography, layout, colour, and contrast).

Problems I’d Like to Solve

If a company’s products help people either save money or live better (or both), I’m automatically interested. However, there are certain customer problems that I have a natural inclination towards. Those include:

Fintech & Financial Education

I believe that my life drastically improved when I started educating myself on personal finance, so I love working on products that aim to solve money-related problems for people.

Housing Crisis

Being able to buy a home should be something that anyone can attain. I don’t have a solution for this broken housing market, but I’d love to work with a company that does.

Consumer & Health Tech

I think that technology can be the enabler to help people live better if used ethically. Being able to utilize it for good causes gives me an incredible sense of fulfillment.

My Journey

My journey into UX was kind of a bumpy ride, to say the least. I started off studying Marketing, but I quickly realized that it wasn't the creative position I was hoping for. I wanted to have a real impact on people's lives, so I started exploring other options.

First, I got into web design, playing around with different CMS's and even learning HTML and CSS. But I wanted something even more creative, something that would really let me flex my design skills.

That's when I discovered UI design, and man, was I hooked! I'd see these amazing interfaces built by other designers and I was like, "I want to be able to do that too!" So I started playing around with different Adobe software until I stumbled upon Adobe XD.

I fell in love with the design aspect of the job and spent hours and hours designing just for fun. But then I hit a bit of a roadblock when I started looking for jobs in the field. I quickly realized that my knowledge of UI wasn't enough and I needed to learn a lot more. I was pretty discouraged and even thought about giving up on my design dream and just sticking with marketing.

But I couldn't shake the feeling that I still had a passion for design, and that's when I discovered UX. As I started learning more about the field, I realized how many concepts were actually intertwined with my marketing knowledge. It gave me such a confidence boost, and I ended up learning everything I could about UX design. I even started doing some freelance projects to gain more experience.

At this point, all I needed was for one company to take a chance on me and once that happened things started going pretty smoothly.

And now, four years later, I'm still learning and growing in the field. It hasn't been the easiest journey, but I'm grateful for all the twists and turns that led me here.

“G brought significant design and creative talent to the products/services that were being built. The team really respected and trusted him for his personal authenticity and customer focus.”

MICHAEL GILL, DIRECTOR OF INNOVATION DESIGN AND VALIDATION, WALMART CANADA