Meet Nixie Melendres, Lead Product Designer

As you may have seen on LinkedIn or on our Jobs page, we've been searching for a Lead Product Designer for quite a while. It was extremely difficult to find the perfect candidate to fill this role because we were looking for a unicorn. We needed a candidate who would:

• Take our "design with empathy" motto to heart and always put the user first
• Help us achieve our goal of making "work" engaging, but also hyper-efficient
• Reimagine the way Augmented Reality (AR) manifests in the enterprise, with a consumer-grade experience
• And be excited to wear many other hats including, but not limited to: contributing to our supportive team culture, leading user research, and elevating our brand (stay tuned for more on this later)

After searching far and wide, I am so excited to say we found her 🦄 I'm honored to welcome Nixie Melendres to the Squint team as our fourth full-time member!

Nixie is a multi-disciplinary product designer who started her career at a visual effects studio after graduating with a B.A. in Motion Graphics. She began working in film production with a desire to learn behind-the-scenes tricks and cinema magic. Shortly after, she explored video and animation at various advertising agencies, working with startups and corporate clients, where she fell in love with storytelling and the idea that stories play a huge part in how people experience moments in their everyday lives. This eventually led her to want to create more experiences outside of advertising, and she landed her first UX and product role at Apple. Since then, she grew a deep passion for technology and trusts that harmonizing technology and humans is a critical method to building a sustainable and bright future ahead.

Throughout 10+ years, Nixie’s diverse job experience includes rotoscoping for movies on the big screen, animating for Samsung commercials, concepting and prototyping the Touch-ID experience at Apple, introducing motion design to the product team at a CIA-backed company called Palantir, working on various types of projects at Meta, including with Instagram, Oculus, and WhatsApp, and creating new HMI (Human-machine interface) experiences for future autonomous cars at Nissan’s innovation lab. 

Outside of work, she explores life through different hobbies and activities including birdwatching, traveling, eating at new restaurants, learning quantum mechanics, hiking, and making art.

Nixie joined the team in the Summer of 2022 with the intent to holistically design the app as a universal and intuitive experience for how people create and consume digital information. She's used Squint with her husband on their BBQ grill & smoker, where they created a workflow of instructions on how to set it up and use it safely. She prefers going through these instructions via Squint, instead of asking her husband to walk her through it multiple times or reading through a 12-page manual.