Profile picture of Ryan Keairns

Welcome

Learn more about Ryan … if you dare.

About

Profile

My current title is Senior Design Manager at Elastic, where I lead teams consisting of product designers, design system engineers, and other managers. Day-to-day responsibilites move between Manager, Director, Principal Designer, and UX Architect.

I consider myself a team player who seeks areas of need and impact. If I have a niche, it could be described as design leader for technical products built on Open Source.

Midwesterner. Now residing in sunny Seattle with my wife, two teenagers, and three cats.

About

Skills

Employer

Elastic

2018 - Present

Elastic.co logo

Experience

Kibana

Directly and indirectly, I have contributed to the user experience of Kibana in many ways. As both a leader and individual contributor of the Platform UX team, we contribute design, research, and frontend code to the most-used portions of Elastic's web products.

Our team is proud to work on core experiences such as Discover, Dashboard, Lens, and Cloud, and a variety of global UIs such as navigation.

With a hat tip to past coworkers, we also support the ongoing design and development of the highly-successful Elastic UI (EUI) design system.

Elastic works in the open. For a peek into what design is like here, you can check out my GitHub issue activty.

For a deeper dive into my work, email me. I love to talk shop.

Employer

Chef

2016 - 2018

chef.io logo

Employer

Startups

2012-2016

HLT logo

Experience

Case studies

A while back, I prepared two in-depth case studies covering everything from sketches and research on through design, metric tracking, and iteration that demonstrated how my work moved the needle.

These were some of my favorite experiences in product design, and I am happy to share them upon request.

My experience goes back another 10+ years covering frontend and backend development.

The former set the course while the latter has not been missed.