Michael Cullinan

Principal UX Designer

Summary

Design Leadership Bridging AI Practice and Human-Centered Craft

UX leader with broad, hands-on experience shaping complex digital products across enterprise, learning, and brand-sensitive environments. Known for bringing structure to ambiguous problem spaces, aligning product, engineering, and business stakeholders, and defining clear interaction models that reduce complexity, improve adoption, and raise the quality of high-stakes workflows. Combines systems thinking, visual craft, accessibility rigor, and an AI-enabled design practice to accelerate decision-making and translate complex business needs into scalable product direction.

Selected Impact

Led enterprise platform design across 25+ global brands

Led experience strategy for Estée Lauder's Concept-to-Market platform, shaping end-to-end workflows used at enterprise scale.

Boosted cross-team onboarding efficiency by 30–40%

Established design standards, component systems, and documentation practices that improved consistency and reduced ramp-up time.

Accelerated concept-to-validated-prototype cycles with AI

Introduced AI-assisted research synthesis and rapid prototyping workflows, cutting concept-to-validated-prototype cycles by ~50% and sharpening partner clarity.

Cut clinical panelist onboarding time by ~60%

Replaced a paper-based intake process at Estée Lauder's Clinical Research Center with a dynamic onboarding application spanning panelist recruitment, IRB-governed eligibility screening, and study scheduling.

Professional Experience

Estée Lauder Companies · Melville, NY
Jan 2019 – Present
Senior UX/UI Designer · Design Lead, Concept-to-Market Platform
  • Own and drive end-to-end UX strategy for the Concept-to-Market platform, supporting complex cross-functional workflows across 25+ global brands.
  • Define scalable interaction models for high-stakes workflows, helping product and engineering converge on clearer solutions and reducing downstream rework by ~20%.
  • Redesigned panelist operations for Estée Lauder's Clinical Research Center, translating IRB-governed, FDA-facing study protocols into a single dynamic onboarding workflow that replaced manual, error-prone intake steps.
  • Optimized user workflows through iterative usability testing, wireframing, and interactive prototyping, reducing user support tickets by ~25%.
  • Serve as the primary design voice with product, engineering, and business leadership across 4–6 product teams within the C2M platform, aligning roadmap priorities with user-centered strategy and influencing scope decisions at the portfolio level.
  • Shaped design principles and review standards adopted across the C2M platform, raising quality and consistency at scale and giving cross-functional partners a shared language for design decisions.
  • Drove design and content strategy for internal learning and enablement experiences used across luxury beauty brands, balancing clarity, trust, and premium brand expectations.
  • Mentor 3+ designers and cross-functional partners through critique, coaching, and design reviews as a Subject Matter Expert within the IT Learning Academy.
  • Coached a junior UX designer through low-fidelity flow design for a cross-device Skin Analyzer application (desktop, tablet, and mobile) for Lab Series, an Estée Lauder brand, guiding interaction patterns, critique, and design decision-making to strengthen both the designer's craft and the delivered experience.
  • Built a functional, AI-assisted prototype for a complex internal workflow initiative and ran three rounds of usability testing with subject matter experts, aligning product, engineering, and leadership on direction weeks earlier than a typical mockup-based discovery process.
Lead UX Designer (Consultant)
Jan 2019 – Dec 2022
  • Defined and executed UX strategy during early-stage C2M platform development, helping shape foundational product direction and experience architecture.
  • Designed and facilitated stakeholder workshops to align business goals with user workflows and translate findings into actionable product frameworks.
  • Built design-system foundations in Figma, including a modular role-based component architecture derived from Ant Design, that cut inconsistency across teams.
  • Led end-to-end design for 2+ innovation initiatives, translating complex domain workflows into structured, testable prototypes that informed product direction.
Dopamine · New York, NY
Dec 2018 – May 2019
Senior UX/UI Designer
  • Collaborated with client Frontier Signal to create a real-time job search application, improving application success rates by 25% through more effective user flows and accessible design.
  • Developed wireframes, prototypes, and polished UI aligned to WCAG 2 standards, contributing to a 10% increase in user engagement.
  • Clarified complex processes through user flows, journey maps, and data visualizations, reducing user error rates by 15%.
RingLead · Melville, NY
Mar 2017 – Dec 2018
Senior UX/UI Designer
  • Conducted interviews and surveys, converting findings into personas, user flows, and high-fidelity prototypes that decreased onboarding time by 20%.
  • Tested design assumptions against real user needs and translated findings into roadmap recommendations that improved customer retention.
  • Led user testing initiatives that cut common task completion times by 30%, and collaborated closely with developers to reduce handoff errors by 25%.
Earlier Experience
Digital / UI Designer · NAPCO Security Technologies (Amityville, NY)

Digital product design, brand systems, and front-end work across four NAPCO business units: web applications, mobile interfaces, and integrated brand programs. Additional portfolio detail available on request.