Wainaina Thomas
Product & UX Designer designing practical, mobile-first digital products for everyday workflows. I focus on untangling complex user journeys, establishing scalable design systems and creating interfaces that make immediate sense to everyday people.
I ground my work in direct user research, rapid prototyping and clear developer handoff — with a working knowledge of HTML and CSS to ensure designs translate faithfully into production.
01 / Technical Skills
Skills & Toolkit
Research & Strategy
Core & MethodsDesign & Execution
Craft & SystemsTools & Collaboration
Software & Web02 / Work Experience
Professional Experience
Product Designer
Freelance / Independent
- —Live PWA Launch: Designed and shipped Dill (live supermarket deal comparison app), conducting interviews with local shoppers across Nairobi and creating a complete 40+ component Figma design system.
- —Clear Developer Handoffs: Built thorough 7-state UI specifications (default, hover, focus, active, loading, error, disabled) and responsive redlines so development proceeded without ambiguity.
- —Frictionless Task Flows: Compressed multi-step form journeys into 3-tap mobile checkouts by testing interactive prototypes directly with real users.
- —Design System Architecture: Structured 3-tier token libraries (colour, typography, spacing) and auto-layout components in Figma to keep interfaces consistent and fast to build.
Clinical Radiographer (Student Rotations)
Kenyatta National Hospital & JKUAT
- —Clinical Precision & Verification: Maintained zero patient identification or imaging errors across emergency trauma shifts by strictly adhering to systematic verification protocols.
- —Hospital Patient Flow Optimisation: Mapped physical queue bottlenecks in hospital imaging departments to reduce wait times — applying the same problem-solving now used in UX journey mapping.
- —Empathetic Communication Under Stress: Explained complex medical imaging procedures clearly to anxious patients (children, elderly, non-English speakers), building the listening and empathy skills I use daily in user research.
03 / Key Projects
Featured Projects
Dill: Supermarket Price Transparency
Promotions were scattered across Instagram stories, unsearchable PDF flyers and in-store posters with no single tool to compare real prices.
Designed and shipped a mobile PWA with hyper-local branch filtering, fuzzy search and deal cards ranked strictly by net shilling savings.
Prioritised absolute shilling savings over distorted percentage discounts after research revealed shoppers mentally calculate in currency, not percentages.
Nairobi National Museum: Restoring Access
Mandatory 12-field government tax portal and declined foreign cards caused 15-minute entrance bottlenecks for visitors and tourists.
Designed an account-free, 3-tap guest flow with dual payment routing (M-Pesa STK push and camera OCR card scanning) and offline QR passes.
Decoupled civic tax registration from cultural leisure ticketing, slashing gate intake latency from 15 minutes down to 45 seconds.
04 / Credentials
Education & Certifications
Bachelor of Radiography (Diagnostic)
Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT)
Rigorous scientific training in diagnostic anatomy, human physiology, clinical workflow optimisation and high-pressure protocol compliance in hospital imaging departments.
IBM UX Design Professional Certificate
IBM / Coursera
Specialised coursework: User Research, Enterprise Design Thinking, Wireframing, Prototyping, Visual Design, Usability Testing Evaluation.