About — Nikki Piccini

UX Strategist · Philadelphia, PA · 8 Years

About me sections: the bane of every introvert.

Hi there, I'm Nikki.

2025 Muse Design Award — Silver Product Design UX/UI/IDX · 5 Alarm / Anthem Entertainment

I'm a UX strategist with eight years of experience working inside organizations at their most complex moments — acquisitions, rapid scale, structural overhaul. The kind of moments where the temptation to ship fast and fix later is highest, and where that instinct tends to cost the most.

My job, as I see it, is to make sure that never happens.

The presenting problem is rarely the diagnosis, and shipping to the wrong one is just an expensive way to stay stuck.

I work research-first. Before a single wireframe gets drawn, I'm interviewing users, stress-testing assumptions, and mapping the gap between what stakeholders believe the problem is and what the evidence actually shows. That gap is almost always where the real work lives. A dashboard request becomes an onboarding infrastructure initiative. A feature ask becomes a workflow redesign.

What makes that reframe land is equal parts research and relationships. I've spent years learning how to bring engineers, product managers, executives, and end users into shared understanding so the right solution actually gets built as designed. Stakeholder trust is what I like to call a "load-bearing soft skill."

95%
User success rate
in prototype testing
8+
Years in complex
product environments
★ '25
Muse Design Award
Silver — UX/UI/IDX
Research & Discovery

I don't take problem statements at face value. I draft interview plans, run generative and evaluative research, and synthesize findings into something an executive can act on and an engineer can build from.

Organizational Alignment

Cross-functional facilitation, stakeholder communication, and building the shared clarity that keeps right solutions from dying in review.

Systems Thinking

I design for how things behave under pressure — at scale, across teams, and over time — not just how they look on a good day.

Strategic Advocacy

Research doesn't ship itself. I know how to champion findings, reframe scope, and create the organizational conditions for the right work to get done.

EdTech B2B SaaS Media & Licensing Healthcare E-Commerce

I specialize in complex product ecosystems — the kind where the problem keeps coming back no matter how many times you patch it. That's usually a signal worth paying attention to.

Got a problem worth solving?

Get in touch