Ryen Beatty
Design Engineer
I'm Ryen, an Australian design engineer living in Berlin.
My work spans product, interface and engineering. Recently I've been building writing and agent training tools with Kentauros, a travel assistant called Otis and supporting the energy transition at Kwest.
Before that I worked on design systems at IBM Instana and ResearchGate.
Lab & Experiments
Otis
Helping working musicians get from A to B.
Otis is a travel booking assistant designed to allow booking agencies to buy travel for DJs. I joined the founding team to prototype and create a new platform from scratch.
[discovery] I evaluated all major flight provider integrations, eventually building out a multi-provider solution that allowed seamless plug-and-play integration with new providers.
The tool replaced email threads, spreadsheets and manual bookings with gig-aware flight recommendations, offer approval, payment requests and automated ticketing.
ResearchGate Design Tools
End-to-end toolchain for product designers.
From '17-'20 I built a suite of custom tools to enable our designers, copywriters and engineers to work in close collaboration, centered around our design system, Nova.
To my knowledge ours was one of the first design systems to be integrated into the actual tools designers were using. We achieved this through a plugin that let designers write JSX to define components.
To ensure we made the correct interventions, the product development process was closely mapped before deciding what tooling to focus on.
A design handoff tool was created that spoke the language of our design system. This was passed to engineers who could then copy and paste the JSX.
I also built a design linting extension, providing designers a feedback loop to validate their work before handing it over.
On top of this, I also built a custom frontend for Jira that pulled in design handoffs from Google Drive, giving our product teams a one stop shop when building out features.
Nova Design System
Serving 1M scientists weekly.
At ResearchGate, I was part of Team Voyager, working on our design system and it's rollout across the product which served ~1M users every week.
Our documentation was defined entirely within the codebase, and provided designers, PMs and engineers with a playground to experiment with components.
Nova was extremely well adopted across the organisation, and we measured very high rates of component usage across the codebase.
I worked on many interaction details across Nova, as well as in the core product.