Sotiris Akridas

Summary

Product designer with 3+ years in product roles across marketplaces and public services. I work on discovery, trust, and conversion in complex platforms — research-led and hypothesis-driven, comfortable owning a problem from ambiguity to shipped interface.

Experience

1. Product Designer · eduki

   January 2025 – Present · Remote

   • Designing a quality module for eduki's product pages that gives every criterion an AI assessor rates high one checkable line about the material. Wrote the rules a generator would have to follow; in round 1, 72.7% of teachers read the lines as specific to the material, though few used them. Round 2 in progress.
   • Designed and ran a discovery before anything was built for eduki's Q3 bet on AI-assisted search: in 7 moderated sessions, no teacher asked for sentence-style search unprompted, and the bet didn't go ahead. Designed the next-word search suggestions that came out of the study, which shipped.
   • Built and organised eduki's research participant pool — segmentation plus governance rules other designers follow, so it stays usable as it scales.
   • Run mixed-methods research end-to-end: user interviews, moderated and unmoderated testing, 5-second tests, preference tests, and surveys (UXtweak, UserTesting).

2. Product Designer · Choose Strategic Communications Partner

   2023 – 2025 · Greece

   • Led UX for two national government platforms (1555.gov.gr, Psifiaki Karta) serving a general-public audience with low average digital literacy.
   • Redesigned 1555.gov.gr from a basic site into a usable service — in surveys of 200 users before launch and 200 after, the share with a complaint fell from roughly 50% to 10%.
   • Simplified request submission across complex public-service structures: regrouped services where the structure allowed, and carried citizens' choices into the form.

3. Founder & Product Designer · DiverBubbles

   2020 – Present · Remote

   • Built and run a live e-commerce product end-to-end since 2020 — brand, product design, Shopify build, merchandising, paid acquisition, and ongoing UX.
   • Audited my own store and paused its redesign: at 3 sessions a day the constraint was traffic, not the storefront. The store is live and earning; I still design the prints.

Skills

• Product design — end-to-end UX/UI for complex platforms
• Research and testing — hypothesis design, user interviews, usability studies (UXtweak)
• Marketplace and discovery — search, trust signals, conversion
• Design systems
• AI in the product and the workflow — rules for an AI copy generator; prototyping with Claude Code and the Figma MCP
• Figma, UXtweak, Microsoft Clarity, UserTesting, accessibility evaluation
• HTML and CSS

Education and credentials

• University of Michigan — User Experience Research and Design (6-course specialization)
• Google UX Design Certificate
• Smashing — Smart Interface Design Patterns
• Smashing — Measure UX and Design Impact
• Smashing — Design Patterns for AI Interfaces
• IxDF — User Research: Methods and Best Practices
• IxDF — Accessibility: How to Design for All
• IxDF — Data-Driven Design: Quantitative Research for UX
• IxDF — Get Ahead in Product Design with AI
• IxDF — Agentic AI for Everyone
• IxDF — Complex UI Design: Practical Techniques
• IxDF — Conducting Usability Testing