About
Design, research, and a bit of code.
I'm Matteo Balocco. I've been working as a Senior UX Consultant and Design Lead for over 20 years, at the intersection of design, research, and front-end development. I'm currently the lead designer at DatoCMS — a profitable headless CMS SaaS with worldwide clients and a team of 13.
I started as a web developer in 2001, and that technical perspective has stayed part of my design approach. I know what it means to deliver something that actually has to work in production.
I work as a senior individual contributor: embedded in the client's team, without layers of management between us. I'm comfortable in rooms with engineers, with C-level stakeholders, and with end users.
Experience
2023 – present
Design Lead DatoCMS
2019 – 2023
UX Engineering Lead Fifth Beat
2020 – 2021
Digital Product Manager Sorgenia (via Fifth Beat)
2020 – 2021
Design System Coordinator Zanichelli (via Fifth Beat)
2011 – present
UX/UI Designer & Frontend Dev Matteo Balocco Studio
2004 – 2011
UX Designer / Information Architect Bluestudio
2001 – 2004
Web Developer Domino Interactive
Skills & tools
Research User Interviews · Usability Testing · Card Sorting · Affinity Mapping · Surveys · Tree Testing · Heuristic Evaluation
Design Interaction Design · Information Architecture · Wireframing · Prototyping · Design Systems · Visual Design
Tools Figma · Dovetail · Condens · Zeroheight · Storybook · Miro · Notion · Linear · Basecamp
Development HTML · CSS · JavaScript · React (reading) · Git
Methodologies Shape Up · Agile · SCRUM · Double Diamond · Jobs-to-be-done
Languages Italian (native) · English (C1 — daily written and verbal use)
Teaching
2025 –
Lecturer, User Experience Design Istituto Europeo di Design, Turin
2018 – 2020
Lecturer, Design and Development for the Web Raffles Institute, Milan
2016 – 2018
Lecturer, Introduction to Web Programming Istituto Marangoni, Milan