James Saras

Product Design & Management

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UX/UI Product Designer.
Based in Orange County, CA.

20+ years building products across proptech, fintech, banking, marketplaces, weather, and data software, leading design from strategy through engineering handoff and driving measurable business outcomes.

Projects & Case Studies

Work Experience

Following CoStar's acquisition of Ten-X, led UX integration across broker, lister, searcher, and auction surfaces. Own product and UX for the Ten-X auction and LoopNet marketplace platforms today, setting roadmap priorities, running discovery sprints, and improving transaction workflows. Redesigned Stripe-powered earnest money deposit and bidder registration flows: +21% deposit recovery, +16% processing speed.

Tools

Figma
Claude
Cursor
Jira
ADO
VS Code
Confluence
Visit CoStar Group

Owned product and UX for enterprise investment platforms, translating institutional equity and multi-asset strategies into scalable web tools including Asset Allocation Interactive (AAI). Partnered with Quantitative Research and Engineering to ship data-dense dashboards on Python-based backends and managed the full ResearchAffiliates.com ecosystem, driving +13% user growth, +16% returning visitors, and +7% session engagement.

Tools

Figma
Adobe XD
Illustrator
Photoshop
After Effects
Premiere
AEM
VS Code
Visit Research Affiliates

Managed a team of five designers, owning UX direction for NCR.com with Marketing. Led information architecture redesigns to simplify key user journeys, validating each change through A/B testing. Results: +27% page views, +14% lead conversion, −9% bounce rate.

Tools

Sketch
Illustrator
Photoshop
Drupal
WordPress
Sublime Text
Subversion
Visit NCR

Started as a Web Developer in 2006 building rich media ads in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, and ActionScript, then grew into Director of Creative Services by 2009, leading an 11-person design and ad engineering team. Defined ad product strategy and delivered award-winning branded content experiences across weather.com, iOS, and Android, growing revenue from $7M to $11M and improving production efficiency by 9%.

Tools

Sketch
Illustrator
Photoshop
Sublime Text
Notepad++
Drupal
Subversion
Jira
Confluence
Bugzilla
Visit The Weather Channel

Education

University of Arizona

B.A. Psychology · minor Media Arts & Design

Achievements

Connect

Feel free to contact me at