The story
Product designer working from research through to shipped, accessible UI. Runs the testing that keeps opinions out of design reviews.
Marco trained as an industrial designer in Milan and spent his twenties designing physical products, where a bad decision costs a tooling run rather than a deploy. He still designs like the mistakes are expensive.
Research before pixels
No project of his starts in Figma. It starts with five to eight sessions watching people attempt the thing the product is supposed to make easy. The fintech onboarding flow that now converts at more than twice its old rate began with a recording of someone abandoning at the address step — not because the form was ugly, but because it asked for a document they did not have to hand.
Systems, not screens
Marco's deliverable is rarely a set of screens. It is a system — tokens, components, states, and the rules for combining them — handed over in a form engineers can implement without interpretation. He sits in build reviews specifically to catch the gap between what was drawn and what got made.
- Runs five to eight moderated sessions before wireframes
- Designs every state, including empty, loading and error
- Checks contrast and focus order as he draws, not afterwards
- Reviews the built UI against the design weekly
The best compliment I get is an engineer telling me there was nothing to ask about. — Marco Bellini
In their words
Every design review has one person with taste and one person with data. I would rather be the second one.