User Experience Design Lead
My name is Amalya Henderson and I am a User Experience / Product Designer in Central New Jersey who is looking for a new full-time position in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, around the DC metro area, or remotely.
I am an experienced UX professional and design systems leader with 10+ years shaping complex digital products. I turn fragmented UI and systems into accessible, scalable foundations and build the strategy, governance, and partnerships that help teams adopt them. I specialize in aligning design, engineering, and stakeholders around common APIs, product quality, and user experience.
If you're interested in working with me, take a look at my resume and contact me.
Staff UX Designer for space applications at Rocket Communications, Inc. from 2019-2026 with a focus on design systems as the Design System Lead for the Astro UX Design System, a design system created for the U.S. Space Force. Learn more about my work at Rocket Communications...
Proudly served as UX researcher, designer, and tester for enterprise applications at SpaceX from 2016-2018. Created new application designs, provided full redesigns for existing products, and updated existing product ecosystems with new and improved features. Learn more about my work at SpaceX...
Researched, tested, and presented augmented reality prototype and usability heuristics to UX Designers and Researchers at the NASA Ames Research Center for my team's capstone project at the end of my Masters degree in 2015. View NASA Ames Capstone Project details...
Worked on projects across the spectrum of UX work from research and design to coding and testing during my Masters degree at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute from 2014-2015. View CMU HCII project case studies...
Provided website support and website design from 2012-2014 for Solution21, Inc., a website design company specializing in websites for dental and medical practices. Quickly rose from Website Support Specialist to Assistant Web Designer and then to the Website Support Manager. View Solution21 visual design samples...
Completed my Master of Human Computer Interaction in 2015. Classes included user-centered research, interaction design, prototyping, programming, human-robot interaction, e-learning, game design, and a capstone project for NASA Ames Research Center.
Graduated in 2011 with a BA in Psychology and a minor in Japanese while working at the school's IT Help Desk. Class topics included experimental methods, statistics, social psychology, cognitive psychology, and the psychology of language.
Amalya is a first-rate professional and a joy to work with. Her UI / UX skills are impeccable, and she has a voracious desire to learn and grow. She was indispensable in helping me manage and transform the approach to product design at SpaceX, and was unflappable in delivering to an organization that consistently presented unreasonable demands. As someone who positively augmented my deficiencies, she made our team stronger by being part of it, and made me a better manager with her candid feedback and willingness to tackle tough issues. Amalya would be a valuable asset in any organization or team, not only as a designer, but especially as someone that can help improve communication and evaluate the effectiveness of current processes. I highly recommend her as a UX designer and future leader.
Amalya is an incredibly talented UX designer, both in her design skills and interactions with customers. She was great at digging into any problem to understand problems and interactions instead of creating what customers believed they needed. I worked with her on an application redesign and new data presentation where we had to take a lot of opinions and differing customer use cases and deliver a single application. With her help, we delivered a great product that was intuitive and provided all information users needed in a clear manner. If our professional paths intersect again or I have a complicated user interaction project, I would want Amalya on my team again in the future.
Amalya is a joy to have on any team. Not only does she bring a great UX eye to all projects, she also takes the time to understand the users and their needs before just jumping in. Amalya also excels at working with software engineers - which is a skill I really appreciate in UX designers. She's able to speak technically and go back and forth to make trades between the ideal UX design and the most practical way to put out a product, ending up on the best product design. I would recommend Amalya for any UX opportunity and I look forward to working with her again in the future.
Amalya and I worked together developing a tool interface that hundreds of people across SpaceX now use on a regular basis. I had struggled getting what I needed through to others but as soon as Amalya joined the project, she knew what was needed even better than I did. She came up with designs quickly and efficiently. She is also very organized in her design presentation and execution. But not only is Amalya an excellent UX designer who quickly gets to the root of what people intuitively need, she is a joy to work with. I genuinely looked forward to working with her and hope that our paths cross again!
Ever need to get a presentation perfect for a boss or director? I had that problem for a Web UI which had visibility to all management at SpaceX up to Gwynne. Luckily Amalya was more than helpful, letting me ask numerous questions about how people would interact with the page, what colors would be the most striking, and where things could be improved. She was able to both see the overall intent, but also dive down into details to make the experience better. This is just one example of Amalya's expertise. Her ability to create well designed user experiences was tremendously helpful in making a normally boring software category, ERP systems, more friendly and usable for all users at SpaceX.
Want to work together? Need some advice? Just want to hang out? I love connecting with new people, so please feel free to reach out and say hello. Looking forward to talking with you!
Email: amalya.henderson@gmail.com
Social Media: LinkedIn
Resume: Amalya Henderson - UX Design System Lead