joans.cat

About

About

I'm Joan Saez-Pons, a design executive who builds. Director of UX at Clarivate Life Sciences & Healthcare, where I lead a 16-person organization across product design, UX engineering, and user research.

For twenty years my work has had one shape. A machine that can do something impressive, and a person beside it who has to trust it, steer it, and defend the result. For the first decade the machine was a robot. Now it is an AI agent. The impressive part was never the hard part; the person next to it always was, and designing for that person is the whole job.

The short version

My career is one long convergence of three things: understanding people (a PhD in human-robot interaction, postdocs in social robotics), building systems (industrial electronics, robotics research, production code to this day), and leading teams that do both.

The longer version

I started with robots. A Marie Curie fellowship in Tübingen modeling how animals navigate space. A PhD at Sheffield Hallam, Experiments in Human Multi-Robot Systems, putting robot swarms alongside firefighters searching smoke-filled buildings. Then postdocs in social robotics: social robots for children at BarcelonaTech's CETPD, and robot companions for elderly people and robots for children with autism at the University of Hertfordshire's Adaptive Systems group. Every project taught the same lesson from a different angle: the hard problem was never the robot. It was the human next to it. Somewhere between a firefighter trusting a swarm, a child bonding with a robot, and an older person accepting a companion, I stopped being a roboticist and became a UX person. (40+ peer-reviewed publications from that era, 750+ citations.)

Then products. London startups. I led UX and front-end for an AI text-intelligence platform at Retechnica, where I shipped a personalized AI news product in 2015, years before "AI product" was a job title, and kept a data-science thread going through Parkinson's disease research (CloudUPDRS, PDKit) that pointed me toward health and science. Startups taught me the other half: research without shipping is a hobby.

Then the long build. I joined Clarivate in 2018 as the first UX designer for what became the Life Sciences & Healthcare segment, and spent the years since turning one seat into a discipline, Senior to Principal to Director, through acquisitions, centralizations and a segmentation. (One six-month detour along the way: PatSnap, where I helped lay the foundations of what is now its life-sciences offering. What brought me back was a better UX plan: a centralized team, real structure, and the Principal role for the segment.) The whole story is in the playbook; the evidence is in the case studies.

Throughout: the keyboard. I never stopped building, which is why my opinions about AI in design come with working code attached (the lab) and a written point of view (the vision, the essays).

Scope, plainly

For the recruiter who needs the facts fast: 16-person UX organization (design, UX engineering, research) for a portfolio of scientific and healthcare intelligence products; three disciplines, two of which I founded here; monthly execution reviews with segment leadership including the segment president; success measured on a quarterly metrics system. Priority alignment 93%, design-system adoption 59% of designer time in year one, research on 71% of the active portfolio, 93% retention. The printable version is the two-page CV, behind the same password as the locked chapters.

How I operate

Beyond work

Catalan, hence the morra game. Based in London. Away from screens I recharge in forests and on the water, and at home there is always a DIY project on the go and a new gadget to justify.

Contact

janisaez@gmail.com · GitHub · LinkedIn · CV (PDF, on request)