// about
Dila Kessi — UI/UX & Visual Designer
I've spent 20+ years designing for people under pressure — a gamer mid-session, a homeowner asleep, an operator one click from an outage. Different industries, same job: make the complex feel effortless.
clearance.level // T-shaped — depth × rangeMy career started in social games and networking, grew through the smart-home boom at TP-Link, and deepened across seven years of enterprise cybersecurity at ColorTokens and Ordr. As founding designer at ColorTokens I took four SaaS products from 0 to 1 — conceiving the Data Visualizer that became the backbone of Xshield, building the company's design system, and owning the full brand identity.
I've designed for B2C and B2B, mobile and desktop — from consumer apps used at home to dashboards used in SOCs, hospitals, and critical infrastructure. An expert Figma practitioner fluent in AI-native workflows, I embed usability testing and product analytics into every cycle to keep decisions grounded in real user behavior. WCAG 2.2 as default, not afterthought. Currently open to senior and principal product design roles across industries.
Sr. UI/UX Designer
Ordr
Contract — rebuilt Ordr Protect dashboards & data-viz patterns
Sr. UI/UX Designer
Ordr
Designed Ordr AI CAASM+, Asset Graph & Ask AI copilot
Principal Product Designer
ColorTokens
Founding designer — 0→1 across Xshield, Xprotect, Xaccess, Xcloud
Lead Product Designer
TP-Link R&D
Founding designer for Kasa Smart connected-home app
Sr. UX Designer
Internal tools for global sales; founded UX Clinic
UX Contractor
Cisco
Smart Grid & industrial router interfaces
UI/UX Designer
Social Games
B2C mobile & web games — onboarding, monetization, live-ops
Operating principles
ApproachLegibility before beauty
Data-dense products fail when users can't tell signal from noise. I design information hierarchy first — density, ranking, and state — then make it feel effortless. Proven across security dashboards, smart-home apps, and consumer games.
0 to 1, then 1 to scale
Founding designer at ColorTokens and Kasa Smart. I know how to establish a design language before a single screen ships, and how to scale it into a system 100 engineers can use without asking me.
AI as craft amplifier
Fluent in Figma AI and Claude as core productivity layers — compressing design-to-build cycles without sacrificing craft or accessibility. High-fidelity, working prototypes that let engineering ship significantly faster.
Research that goes on-site
Contextual inquiry inside SOCs, hospital networks, biomed teams, and living rooms. Ran usability testing with Fullstory and Pendo to keep every decision grounded in real user behavior, not assumption.
Architecting multi-layered enterprise interfaces — a 240-component, token-driven system 100 engineers adopted without asking me.
Turning dense, abstract telemetry into legible hierarchies a user can act on in seconds, not minutes — across security, IoT, and consumer products.
0-to-1 founding speed at ColorTokens and Kasa, then scaling into systems that compound — proven across three product orgs.
Concept to high-fidelity, working prototype at a pace that lets engineering ship significantly faster than the roadmap assumed.
Fluent in the developer's language — design that survives the build intact and lands handoff-ready to the last pixel.
The connective tissue between stakeholder vision and engineering feasibility — roadmap decisions that actually ship.
core_skills
education
MFA, Web Design & New Media
Academy of Art University, San Francisco, CA · 2009 – 2012
BFA, Graphic Design
École Supérieure des Beaux Arts, Algiers, Algeria · 2000 – 2005