Hello. My name is

ZakElyazgi

I am an accomplished UX, product design and research leader with 25 years of experience tackling design challenges across a wide array of industries.

As Senior Director of UX and Creative Services, at Verisign, I built and led teams across UX, research, and brand—establishing standards, operational rigor, and measurable impact.

I focus on transforming complex, messy experiences into simple, engaging and satisfying ones.

Browse Zak’s Work Experience View Samples of Zak’s Recent Work

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A good user experience designer needs to be able to see

both the forest and the trees.

That means user experience has implications that go far beyond

usability, visual design, and physical affordances.

— Eric Reiss, Author & Information Architect

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ZakElyazgi

Notable Roles & Clients

Sr. Director, UX & Creative Services
Verisign
Oct. 2021 - Present

Scaled and led a multidisciplinary team spanning UX, research, project management, and versatile designers across digital, print, and video; established foundational design operations, creating clarity, accountability, and measurable improvements in efficiency, allowing the team to actively measure capacity, plan with greater precision, and boost overall productivity.
Transformed design operations by streamlining intake, workflow, and documentation; adopted Agile practices and two-week sprint cycles, reducing design hours and accelerating campaign delivery timelines.
Directed the end-to-end redesign of Verisign.com (120+ pages), bringing the site into accessibility compliance, strengthening brand perception, and delivering significant cost savings by executing the project internally at a fraction of the cost of outsourcing to a design agency.
Led the redesign of Verisign’s flagship product, NameStudio, integrating LLM-powered AI into the user experience to enable conversational domain name suggestions and search, increasing user engagement by over 30%.
Unified brand guidelines, design systems, and global marketing workflow, driving consistency across products and sub-brands, enabling faster campaign launches, reducing rework, and ensuring more effective and impactful campaigns worldwide.

Director, User Experience
Halfaker & Associates
Sep. 2018 - Oct. 2021

Built and scaled the company’s first UX practice, hiring, mentoring, and leading a distributed team of designers and researchers, and embedding human-centered design into high-visibility federal government programs.
Instituted design systems and Agile-aligned UX processes that reduced delivery cycles, improved efficiency, and ensured consistency across multiple public-facing and enterprise applications.
Partnered with federal stakeholders across multiple projects and product lanes to modernize mission-critical platforms, driving measurable gains in usability, accessibility compliance, and user satisfaction as captured through voice-of-the-customer tools like ForeSee.
Elevated Halfaker’s market position by publishing thought-leadership content and representing the company externally, which directly supported new business wins and strengthened strategic partnerships, and contributing to the company’s successful acquisition by SAIC.

Director, User Experience
SiriusXM Radio Inc.
Jan. 2014 - Sep. 2018

Launched and scaled SiriusXM’s first in-house UX practice, building a high-performing team that supported digital platforms serving more than 12 million monthly unique visitors.
Transformed digital self-service and subscription workflows, driving a shift from 18% to 50% of transactions online, delivering tens of millions in annual cost savings and increasing trial-to-paid subscription conversion rates.
Established data-driven design culture by co-founding SiriusXM’s digital A/B and user testing programs, enabling product and marketing teams to make informed decisions that improved engagement and revenue outcomes.
Created and implemented a unified UX style guide and pattern library, reducing design and development rework substantially and ensuring a cohesive experience across SiriusXM.com digital properties.
Partnered with Marketing and Product leaders to deliver high-impact digital campaigns and product launches, aligning user experience with subscriber acquisition and retention goals.
Advocated for UX at the executive level, ensuring that user-centered design became a strategic lever in shaping SiriusXM’s digital transformation and customer experience strategy.
Led initiative to eliminate design-to-production friction and quality gaps by strategically building front-end coding capability into the UX team and taking direct ownership of front-end development, significantly improving shipped product quality while reducing Engineering workload.

Sr. User Experience Designer
SiriusXM Radio Inc.
Mar. 2012 - Jan. 2014

Design the user experience for SiriusXM.com’s account management mobile and desktop web application, translating requirements and user needs into design artifacts including task flows, wireframes, clickable prototypes and high-fidelity mockups.
First UX Designer hired by the company.

Sr. Consultant (UX)
Acumen Solutions
Jun. 2011 - Mar. 2012

Primary engagement was as a contract UX consultant to SiriusXM Radio, Inc. (June – December).
Provided UX guidance for Acumen’s iPad application FAST (Field Assistance for Sales Teams), a digital sales and acquisition tool for in-the-field sales staff.

UX Designer (Consultant)
National Student Clearinghouse
Apr. 2010 - Mar. 2011

As part of a newly-formed Agile development team, develop accessible user experience for degree, enrollment, and professional certificate verification web applications.

UX/Information Architect (Consultant)
Personal Pathways, LLC
Aug. 2007 - Jan. 2010

Lead UI/UX Designer and Information Architect for emerging corporate social networking product with extensive database backend.
Responsible for auditing design, functionality and information architecture, and usability of previous enterprise-level website and designing the interaction flow, wireframes, low and high-fidelity prototypes, user experience and visual design.

UX Designer / Creative Director (Freelance)
Daze Studios, LLC
Jun. 2001 - Mar. 2012

Lead new user interface designs through the full design and development cycle (including concept, information architecture, visual design and interaction design).
Develop style guides and work closely with the development team, business analysts and executive leadership to ensure design and UX intent is carried through to production.
Redesign the entire user interface, interaction flow, information architecture and user experience of several enterprise-level web sites and applications.
As Creative Director, lead the design, development and production teams involved in all print, online, interactive and video projects from concept to launch.
Design websites, logos, business cards, stationary, ad slicks, promotional and advertising materials, signs, multimedia presentations, direct mail, email campaigns, and other deliverables.
Produce, direct and edit promotional and music videos.

Sr. Systems Administrator
Aol, Inc.
Sep. 1997 - Mar. 2007

Served as team lead and mentor for multiple teams simultaneously within Network Operations Center (NOC), and as a liaison to Operations teams.
Co-founded and built DBA Operations support (monitoring and troubleshooting) team within NOC; co-founded Storage Systems Operations support team.
In addition, played a significant contributing role in the formulation of companywide Diversity and Inclusion policies and initiatives, including presenting committee ideas to top leadership in the company.
Certified as a Sybase Database Administrator.