Hi, I’m Brent Vitolins, and I am passionate about great design.
I’m a Senior UX Designer living in Seattle, Washington, with over 20 years of experience contributing to and leading the creation of award-winning cross platform design solutions. My passions are UX design, interaction, visual, and motion design. I have been an individual contributor, and I have led design teams and created, prototyped, and shipped numerous solutions for multiple companies, including Expedia, Microsoft, Best Buy, and Paul Allen’s Digeo.
I create great looking and functional designs that align to business goals and delight users. I have extensive experience in qualitative and quantitative testing and believe in proving the efficacy of a solution with meaningful testing and usability data. During my time at Microsoft, I played a significant role in changing the culture to one where design is always optimized via testing and user experience.
My philosophy is that design should be engaging, useable, proven, and validated with quantifiable results. What sets me apart from other UX designers is my ability to balance great visual and interaction design with deep understanding of user behaviors, based on years of accumulated knowledge from extensive qualitative and quantitative testing. I have received numerous compliments for being the most thoughtful and thorough designer they have ever collaborated with.
When I’m not creating great customer-centric solutions, I enjoy hiking, racing cars (autocross), mentoring kids, and building houses in Mexico for others.
What People Are Saying
“I had the pleasure of working with Brent and learned a lot while working with him even though it was only for a short period of time.
We were moving a large Webapp to native and Brent assisted with the new design and layout for one of many modules being converted. He is passionate about consistency and was very instrumental in helping craft the standard treatments, layout, and navigation for which the rest of the functions will also be built. Brent loves to put together a great prototype because he understands how important it is to have your customers vet what you may do before any dev begins. His prototypes are my favorite artifact provided and we will ensure any future designers also understand the importance of this being available. Brent is great at asking questions and “why?” sometimes multiple times if he isn’t satisfied with the first answer. This led us to some functional options that probably would not have otherwise been considered.
I recommend Brent based on his desire to understand the outcome of any request, his attention to detail, and his desire to provide the best product to the end user.”
JENN BOUCHEY
Product Manager — Best Buy
“Brent drove experimentation design and UX at Microsoft. His approach is customer-centric, and in group brainstorming sessions, he effectively kept the group focused on the pain points we were trying to solve. He clearly demonstrated an openness to different perspectives while also advocating for his own POV, providing supporting documentation from past experimentation/user studies and competitive analysis to support his ideas.
He also proactively worked with our team to propose experiments, presenting mock up designs that we could share across stakeholders. Brent's design skills are aligned with his approach to all work: customer-centric and clearly addressing identified pain points that he could solve with his design expertise.”
DEBORAH McKAY
Product Marketing Manager — Microsoft
“I worked with Brent for several years in his roles as UX Designer and Strategist for the Microsoft Digital Store as well as various websites for organizations across the company. In the experiences he designs, I can testify that he puts the customer first - researching points of friction customers are experiencing and/or conducting competitive/heuristic analyses to identify industry best practices that inform his innovative designs.
What I appreciate is his thoughtful, data-driven approach as he champions and has conducted many quantitative experimentation and qualitative user research studies create designs to optimize our websites. Several of the many successful projects he's executed for us include the Microsoft digital store configurator UX, which improved the checkout experience and increased orders, as well as websites like the Microsoft Affordable Access Initiative to equip entrepreneurs to provide broadband access to communities around the world.”
MICHAEL WU
Senior Program Manager — Microsoft
“When I first started at Microsoft as a contractor, Brent was my manager. After I transitioned to a FTE role, he was my peer and team-mate, for many years. This gave me an opportunity to work with him in several different roles, in each being equally impressed by his thoughtful approach to problem solving, incredible kindness and fascinating talent.
As a leader, Brent is considerate and clear, helpful and invested in your success. As a partner, he is curious, super customer-focused, understands a wide spectrum of design, content and UX issues and always willing to jump in, and evolve experiences. Over and over I am fascinated with his ability to recognize a good opportunity to systematically improve UX or content.
These last few years, his role was focused on experimentation, and we collaborated on projects to optimize and evolve campaigns online. Again, we worked seamlessly, I appreciated his expertise and passion, and was reminded how great it feels when we team up.
Wherever Brent lands next, his team will benefit from this goldmine of knowledge, talent, ideas, and kindness. I am left with hope that our paths will cross again.”
MILENA DEDIJER
Creative Director — Microsoft
“You bring a passion for the space and your profession - it's been a joy working with you on various projects, especially the ones where we have tried to really change it up. You focus on the customer and their experience and look for the challenges a customer will have in understanding and selecting our product. You really think about the problem, and you're complete in your analysis from the viewpoint of customer issues, data and previous work and experiments”
JEFF McKEAN
Product Marketing Manager — Microsoft
“Brent is able to translate complex user scenarios into intuitive functional designs while accounting for the various edge cases that often require clarification once designs proceed to engineering. Brent has always been very receptive to feedback and happy to answer questions during the engineering process.”
JUSTIN WATKINS
Experimentation Web Developer — Microsoft
“Brent’s impact on this team has been monumental. His work ethic, attention to detail, and thoroughness in critical thinking are all skills that we will miss.”
JESSICA DERKLEIN
Senior Design Manager — Best Buy
“Brent immersed himself in the work and built a great product for our users. Just as important, he helped us to think differently about how we approach UX and that will have a lasting impact on our team.”
JAYSEN SMITH
Senior Product Manager — Best Buy
“Brent is a thoughtful UX designer with vast experience for web user journeys across the customer lifecycle. He is detail-oriented and seeks to understand the true source of customer pains/opportunities, using both data and UX best practices.”
BENSON CHAN
Principal Design Director — Microsoft
“I had the pleasure of working with Brent in his short time at Xpanse. Brent was reliable and was a great counterpart to collaborate with. He continuously delivered thorough designs that were based off of diligent UX research. He was very open to feedback and was very receptive to other people's ideas, allowing the team to quickly align on action items. He was very meticulous with design reviews and prioritized design principles. I hope to have the chance to work with him in the future.”
FAN GUI
Product Manager — Xpanse