Product Designer — IT background, Rutgers & EXL

Carlos Buenano

I design digital products by starting where the friction actually is — support tickets, broken flows, disconnected systems — then build the interface that fixes it.

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Portrait of Carlos Buenano
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Product Design· UX Research· Brand Systems· Figma· Explainable AI UX· Information Architecture· Product Design· UX Research· Brand Systems· Figma· Explainable AI UX· Information Architecture·
About

I'm currently a Desktop Support Engineer at EXL, with an IT & Data Science background from Rutgers — and I'm transitioning into product design.

That path is the throughline of this portfolio. Every project here started from something real I observed doing the work: a shop with no online presence, an IT help desk fielding the same requests on repeat, a company that sells AI without visibly demonstrating it. I don't design from invented briefs when I can help it — I design from friction I've actually seen.

I care about the unglamorous parts of a product: what happens when a system is out of sync, when an error message doesn't explain itself, when a flow makes sense to the person who built it but not the person using it. That's usually where the real design work is.

Currently Desktop Support Engineer, EXL
Background IT & Data Science, Rutgers University
Focus Product design, systems thinking, real-user friction
Selected work

Three problems. Three real starting points.

01 Heladería Iglú
Heladería Iglú website hero Heladería Iglú website product shots Heladería Iglú website menu
Heladería Iglú app welcome screen Heladería Iglú app home screen Heladería Iglú app cart screen
Brand system · Mobile app

Heladería Iglú — Brand & App

A real, family-owned ice cream shop in Riobamba, Ecuador with no website and no way to take orders online. I built the brand system and site, then extended it into a mobile ordering app — the same design system applied across two surfaces.

  • Extracted a real brand system (color, type, imagery, voice) from the live, deployed site rather than inventing one
  • Rebuilt an off-brand app prototype — purple, generic sans-serif, mismatched placeholder content — into a true extension of the site's identity
  • Replaced template placeholder content (wrong currency, unrelated menu items) with real menu data and pricing
Figma · Brand systems · Content strategy
02 ScarletHub
ScarletHub home screen ScarletHub create ticket screen ScarletHub knowledge base screen
IT self-service · Mobile app

ScarletHub — Rutgers OIT Self-Service App

Since joining the Rutgers IT Help Desk, I fielded the same requests dozens of times a week — RUWireless setup, ScarletMail activation, software access — spread across desktop-oriented pages with no single mobile entry point. ScarletHub consolidates them around what a student is actually trying to do.

  • Research grounded in real, repeated frontline observation — not a simulated persona
  • Platform-specific setup guides (Windows/macOS/Linux/Android/iOS) instead of one generic page, cutting the filtering burden that caused the most walk-in traffic
  • Self-service surfaced ahead of ticketing and chat, reflecting what actually reduced support load in practice
Figma · Information architecture · UX research
03 EXL Foresight
EXL Foresight claims queue screen EXL Foresight claim detail screen EXL Foresight trends screen
Predictive analytics · Speculative concept

EXL Foresight — Claims Risk & Fraud Cockpit

EXL Service sells data and AI analytics but has no client-facing product that visibly demonstrates it. I audited their real digital footprint, found the gap, and designed a decision-support cockpit for insurance claims teams — built on a real logistic regression model I trained in Python, not placeholder numbers.

  • Explainability as the core design problem — every flagged claim shows plain-language reasoning pulled from the model's actual fitted coefficients
  • A what-if scenario comparison lets a non-technical reviewer build trust in the model instead of just accepting its output
  • Framed honestly as a proposed concept, not commissioned work — a real gap, a speculative fix
Figma · Python · Explainable AI UX
Get in touch

Let's talk about a role, a project, or just design.

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