One night,
When I was TEN...
I am at a friend's house. This is not just a courtesy visit. I'm excited. We are here with a precise scope. Observe the Internet!
Black boxes and wires, dust (a lot of it), a bunch of weird rattling noises, and a call to a local phone number. I wait in front of an Amiga... a lot…, and then, suddenly, one piece at a time, a website. The f*****g site of NASA. It appears in the closet of my friend's house, on a monitor, here, in Italy.
Ok.
Wow.
I'm shocked and bound for life.
It was 1993.
I was so focused that I got my computer within that year: an Intel 486 PC. Nobody in my family could use it, least of all myself considering I was still a kid. I broke it several times, but I was making progress. I got quickly bored of Microsoft Paint and switched to Autocad LT and Adobe Photoshop. From this point, my life has been an uninterrupted timeline of discoveries, new software, and new technologies.
It has been over 30 years and I still don't have enough. My biggest regret is not being able to observe the technological evolution expected 1,000 years from now. I wish I could be there and see how far we can get. Hari Seldon would agree, I guess.
Fast forward, let's get back to the present.
I have been working for the group aruba.it for 10 years. Arezzo is my home.
I have been for some years the head of the User Experience department. I develop design strategies, workflows, and projects together with my teams. I manage the evolution process of Morning Star, aruba.it design system. My mission is to pave the way for my colleagues and their ideas. This is the manager's task, right?
Now and then, when no one's looking, I invent and design. You don't live just of video calls, statistics, and plans.
Hello from Italy! :-)
Hi, I'm Andrea Mancini
and I stand up steadily for people's digital happiness
Since I started studying, I have been engaged in the mission of creating satisfying digital journeys. Many years later, as a User Experience Manager, I stand up for the right of people to take advantage and satisfaction from technology. All of them: customers, users, teammates, and colleagues. I'm constantly aiming for win-win solutions.
I'm focused on creating the business conditions for interpreting technology through design. In my career, I created many teams from scratch. I set up people, processes, tools, and KPIs to make them efficient and profitable.
Listening, trust, and people empowerment are my superpowers. I believe that good design will change the world for the better. I want to be an active part of this endless evolution.
Education and Certifications
High School Degree in electronic and telecommunications at ITIS T. Buzzi in Prato
Bachelor in Industrial design at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Florence
PRINCE2® 2017 Foundation & Practitioner
ITIL® v3 Foundation
Certified User Research by Interaction Design Foundation
ScrumAlliance Product Owner CSPO®
Professional Scrum Master I by Scrum.org
UXQB® CP-UX Foundation certified + trainer
CURRENT ACTIVITIES
I'm working for a digital software company as a business unit manager. I'm building a new department to offer digital design skills in the web enviroment. We work for enterprise companies in the medical, financial, and bank fields.
Past Activities
The User Experience department has as its objective the user’s satisfaction in his/her interaction with the company. The group consists of freelancers and employees. We are experts in interaction design, interface design, illustration, statistics and data analysis, web programming, and of course, user experience. The group has twenty units now and it represents the evolution of the Graphics department which only dealt with marketing production. The group later added support to software development for the realization of interfaces and further created a certain synergy with the production department aimed at the definition of strategies and projects. Ergo, the department follows the development of projects from the early stage, contributing to shaping the requirements and continuing the prototyping of interfaces and flows till the collaboration with those who implement them.
Furthermore, we have been assigned the designing and programming of sale websites. Such portals are the single point of buying access. During the five years 2012-2017, together with the working group, we dealt with their successful migration from static to dynamic solutions (Kentico). In such an evolution the following features were added: Responsive design, multilanguage, use of CDNs, HTML5, SVG, JSON-LD technologies, and much more.
Some examples are Aruba PEC, Arubacloud, and Aruba Enterprise.
I do appreciate the smart working method, design thinking, and user-centered design. I consider the support of real data, both qualitative and quantitative, as a fundamental criterion for a good design strategy. For this reason, I have promoted and introduced the following into our company: heat maps (Crazyegg), user feedback (Usabilla), user test (TestingTime), navigation data analysis (Matomo), and market benchmarking.
Other actions that have proved to be effective were the adoption of visual and interface guidelines (2012) and the construction of an internal design system both for Web and mobile (2018-2020).
My leadership role has consolidated over the years, allowing me to increase my competence and responsibility. Till today, I have created and collaborated with the creation of hundreds of projects, some of which were very appreciated by the public such as Aruba e-invoicing or certified mail, which the Aruba.it Group is the market leader. Other important projects are on the way.
I have successfully dealt with multiannual projects as well as with emergencies that only I was able to solve. I have built working groups carefully selecting each resource. Such groups, even after years, perform and hardly get into difficulty.
Is this enough for me? Not at all! :-)
97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts
I’m a co-author of this book of wisdom from experts about UX. It started in 2020 and it was a full remote process, from selection to development and proofreading. I'm glad to be part of this pool of experts and collaborate with O'Reilly. Working on 2nd edition.
Store link: www.amazon.com/dp/1492085170
Running is part of my identity. I enjoy staying close to nature and I participate in agonistic races.
The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
Walter Bagehot