Hi, I’m Brent Vitolins

I actually started in advertising design, chasing that itch to sell things creatively. Distilling a campaign down to one clear audience and one clear problem to solve taught me to do the same in UX: know who I'm designing for and what actually matters, then cut the rest. Today I'm a Product Designer based in Seattle, with over 20 years spent designing, prototyping, and shipping cross-platform experiences that actually work for the people using them. I've done this both as a hands-on individual contributor and as someone leading a design team, building things for companies like Expedia, Microsoft, Best Buy, and T-Mobile, plus a startup along the way.

Microsoft is where I spent the bulk of my career, 14 years total: 9 telling the Microsoft ecosystem story across marketing sites like the homepage, Download Center, Microsoft Search, and dozens of unique product launch sites, then 5 years on the e-commerce Optimization team as a growth/experimentation designer. There, I started our qualitative testing program to complement our quantitative work: experiments that included qualitative testing won 81.8% of the time, versus 40% for those that didn't. I also spent a lot of time teaching other teams why, how, and when to test, so they could design experiments around what they actually wanted to learn and iterate on a new design with data along the way.

Best Buy was a great new challenge: a chance to really dig into both the physical and digital sides of how employees worked, from the warehouse floor to the internal tools they used every day. I spent years untangling legacy systems in Customer Support, Service Repairs, and Supply Chain, sitting with warehouse associates, repair techs, and support agents to understand how the work actually happened, then finding the clearest path through problems that were genuinely messy and technical. I also mentored product, business, and engineering partners who'd never worked with a designer before, bringing them into the process rather than just handing them a finished screen.

The clearest lesson I carry into every project came from reviewing over 400 Microsoft experiments and analyzing what wins and doesn't: it's easy to get hung up on making something look clean and minimal, when what actually matters is whether it's clear and useful for the real person using it. I pair strong visual, motion, and interaction design with a real read on how people actually behave, built from years of testing and research. I've been told more than once that I'm the most thoughtful and thorough designer people have worked with.

Outside of work, I'm probably out hiking or racing cars at autocross events, picking up the guitar, or chasing landscape shots with my camera. I also love giving back, especially with kids, whether that's mentoring, building houses in Mexico, or volunteering at an orphanage in Thailand.