Ryan Leffel is a user experience and product leader with expertise crafting user-centric design strategies, building teams, and evolving design processes. He works to drive product and business growth through digital transformation, innovation, and elevating the user experience, while helping brands to maximize customer success.
His inherent passion for finding elegant solutions to complex organizational and design challenges led Ryan to earn a Master’s degree in Interactive Design from the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. After earning his degree at NYU, Ryan took on lead user experience roles at companies including R/GA, Yahoo!, Corra, Pearson and Priceline. Ryan has been a featured speaker in both the US and abroad on topics including design, ecommerce and multi-channel strategy, personalization, and managing teams through change.
Ryan is currently the Head of Design at Priceline where he oversees design and research for web, marketing, mWeb and app. With extensive experience in UX, design leadership, user research, digital and multi-channel strategy, he excels at ensuring business objectives and user needs are being met with ease.
Upcoming Talks
12 October 2023
In this captivating talk, Ryan shares his career journey, reflecting on key milestones that have shaped his professional trajectory. Ryan will share his entrepreneurial journey en route and will shed light on the challenges of navigating his way back into the design field after his entrepreneurial venture.
He highlights how these milestones have enabled him to make remarkable transformations for his team at Priceline; evolving from being one of the least engaged across the company to the most engaged for two consecutive years. By the end of his talk, Ryan leaves the audience with a fresh perspective on managing career transitions, emphasizing the importance of embracing new opportunities, leveraging past experiences, and maintaining adaptability
Past Talks
17 May 2023
People love to chase what's shiny and new - but everything is a tradeoff. A new framework might solve some of your existing problems, but it might have unintended consequences. How do you know when it's worth the time and investment to switch, or whether it's safer to stick with what you know.
17 June 2021
In order to bring tangible value to the user, regular insights must be delivered to internal teams that enable real-time decision-making. But how do you generate segmentation data and insights that clearly translates what the team needs to know about the user?
moderated by Jennifer Cardello, VP, Head of UX and Insights for Fidelity Insurance, our panelists will share how to best incorporate customer insights into the decision-making processes to continually measure and learn how actions impact customer behaviour and how they’ve embedded customer insights into their team to create a continuous learning culture.
16 June 2021
Design is more complicated today than ever. The truth is, this is only the beginning. From an array of screen sizes, numerous channels, and choice overload, we have a lot to think about, all while considering a consumer mindset that expects simplicity on demand.
In this talk, Ryan will uncover how his team at Priceline has needed to uncover insights from their users to be able to shift their approaches when designing their products to ensure winning experiences. He will touch on:
- What current design trends are we seeing and what are the challenges associated with them?
- How do you gather your data and insights from your users and what is the best way to prioritise these insights?
- How do you test your designs?
- What advice Ryan has for product designers/product teams to look out for when designing products?
- What he sees in the future for product design?