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About the human in the room

I am Sayonara Bittencourt and I'm a Product Designer from Recife (Brazil) based in Ireland. I spend most of my time in my home office, so I made sure that it was a place I could feel both comfortable and productive. I'm often observed by my two cats - in the photo you can see my female cat Troi ... my other cat Data is probably causing havoc somewhere else.

I've always had a strong connection with arts and crafts, so I decorated my office with my various projects I've painted, built and designed over the years.

My most treasured item is the acoustic guitar of my late father. My father was my most important supporter in pursuing my career and a very talented musician. When he passed away I made sure to bring his guitar back home with me. I like the idea that my father is watching over me while I'm working and making sure I'm able to provide for the people I love.

My technical expertise


App Design

Responsive Design

Web Prototyping

Motion Design

Content Design

Atomic Design Systems
My teamplayer strengths


Stakeholder management

Data reporting

Effective documentation

Workshop mediation

Public speaking
Work experience

  • Led the design of a new authentication platform, allowing customers to view all of their energy accounts in the same dashboard. Over 200k customers have successfully logged-in into the new platform (67% conversion rate) in February and March 2025.
  • Led the design of SSE Airtricity's new app dashboard, streamlining the customer experience as soon as they log in, bringing a more accessible end-to-end journey.
  • Owner and maintainer of the new SSE Aitricity atomic design system, created on Figma and prepared for Storybook. I also support the team with atomic design coaching and making sure every designer's delivered project follows the design system's documentation and accessibility best practices.
  • Led the content and UI design audit of SSE Airtricity's help centre. This resulted in improvements to information architecture and the creation of Content Design guidelines to improve the readability and quality of our articles.
  • Supported UX manager with the acquisition of usability testing tools, from vendor selection and trial periods to signing of contracts. This allowed deeper understanding of budgets and the return of investment in empowering designers with validating prototypes.

  • Led the design of DoneDeal's new photo and video gallery, which supports the generation of higher quality leads. Car dealers have reportedly started making even more of an effort to include videos in their ads since they historically get more views from potential buyers.
  • Led the design of DoneDeal's website quick search filters, allowing users to refine their search, make more informed decisions when sending an enquiry and increasing the volume of saved searches.
  • Led the design of a feature that allowed DoneDeal customers to receive more relevant "similar car” notifications, leading to a 60% increase in monthly new saved searches. Subsequently, customer satisfaction regarding email alerts significantly improved, with 69.4% of respondents rating the daily search emails as “useful” and "very useful".
  • Led the redesign of DoneDeal's “place ad” page, allowing for a more accessible and efficient user experience. This was also our opportunity to develop new design system components in React.js and a new Figma library.

  • Even after leaving Crowe Ireland in September 2017, the company decided to maintain key design projects with me such as the Crowe Annual Hotel Report, published and printed every year to analyse the health of the hotel industry in Ireland from a financial perspective. I design visual graphs, tables, format the publication for web and print readers since 2016.
  • I've had the pleasure of working with Landmark Productions by designing social media assets, edit live production videos and design marketing material for plays such as Once, Asking for It, Happy Days, Walking with Ghosts, Medicine and more.
  • Created social media images, videos and website assets to promote the 2021 Galway Internal Arts Festival and the 2018 Cúirt International Festival of Literature.

  • Designed official presentations and proposal for public tenders. I also designed some of the assets for clients obtained during those tender processes. Some of my major projects included public transport billboards for Ireland Ancient's East campaigns in 2016 and infographics to support consultancy services for the HSE
  • Designed the Crowe Annual Hotel Report, published and printed every year to analyse the health of the hotel industry in Ireland from a financial perspective. The report contained visual graphs, tables, photos and advertisement imagery.
  • Created B2B social media imagery to support the advertisement of their consultancy services and marketing campaigns. Often assets included branded imagery, interviews with employees and infographics.
  • Designed Crowe's official brochures such as the official Crowe Ireland services brochure and the Crowe's Graduate Programme brochures.

Education & Academic Awards

  • Awarded with the Science Without Borders scholarship in 2015, a scholarship provided to selected university students in Brazil with the opportunity of studying a year of their course abroad with all expenses paid. I've selected the Technological University Dublin (Blanchardstown) since the Creative Digital Media course included so many interesting modules such as UX Design, Design Thinking, Video Editing and Web Development.
  • In 2019 I was awarded with the Government of Ireland Scholarship and gained the opportunity of finishing my entire undergraduation in TU Dublin with all expenses paid. This scholarship is only awarded to 60 non-European students every year to either finish their undergraduation or obtain a master's degree in Ireland.
  • Awarded with Best Project of the Year of the Creative Digital Media class of 2019 with The Senior Room, a web interactive project I've designed and developed to bring awareness about loneliness amongst older people in Ireland.
  • The Senior Room also won Best Paper of the year within TU Dublin's School of Media in 2019.
  • I've graduated in 2019 with First-class honours and a GPA of 3.96/4.0
Photo of Sayonara Bittencourt as a 21-year old in front of the Dublin Castle Photo of Sayonara Bittencourt holding an academic award for best project of the year Photo of Sayonara Bittencourt graduating with a Bachelors in Creative Digital Media

  • I've entered the Design course back in 2013 immediately after finishing high school. I was honored to be awarded a fully paid research opportunity by the university due to the grades I've obtained to join the university. This research gave me the opportunity of publishing a paper called Analysing the use of digital smart boards in primary education in Recife, which was submitted to the 7th International Congress of Information Design in 2015.
  • Modules during my years in the university included History of Design, Typography, Packaging Design, Carpentry, UX Design and more.
  • During the year of 2015 I've completed part of my course in Ireland thanks to the Science Without Borders scholarship. I've chosen on transferring my university credits completely in 2018 when I became a recipient of the Government of Ireland scholarship and finished my undergraduation abroad.

  • In the year of 2010, I was enroled in a very different high school - where I actually also got to spend 3 years learning game design, preparing myself for a digital and fresh job market.
  • During those years I was introduced to modules such as Designing with Adobe Illustrator, 3D Modeling in Blender and using Photoshop to design my very first GUI (Game User Interface) for mobile games.
  • I've participated in multiple global game jams, local game jams and competitions. In the 2012 Brazilian Games Symposium I received my first ever design award with the 3rd Place in Visual Design for Mobile Games with the game "Crash Boom Monster". This competition was open for any student of a game design course, from technical schools like mine to university students.
Photo of Sayonara Bittencourt as a 17-year old working on a mobile game Photo of Sayonara Bittencourt as a 17-year old with her friend Sam during a game jam Photo of Sayonara Bittencourt as a 17-year old drinking a red bull with her game design teacher

A photo of Sayonara's two cats, Data and Troi, relaxing in her office.
Thank you for reading!
Feel free to email me at sayonarabittencourt@gmail.com or connect with me on LinkedIn if you'd like to talk about opportunities or cats! I'm easy both ways :)
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Website designed and developed by Sayonara Bittencourt