Name
Joseph Alfonso
Title
Principal Product Designer
Location
Seattle
Rev.

I lead design on enterprise systems at global scale, and I find the problems nobody put in the brief.

15+ years in product design and leading design since 2014, from a document platform with 4.8 billion records in 67 countries to real-time collaboration tools for K–12 classrooms. I also mentor early-career designers at Designlab and the School of Visual Concepts.

LinkedIn ↗ About me Email

01 Selected work

Amazon Employee Document Management admin dashboard

Amazon · 2020–May 2026

Employee Document Management & AI

$9M+ saved per year

Early in research I found employees using screen readers who had memorized where menu items sat, because the product couldn’t be read aloud. I led the redesign of the platform behind 4.8 billion documents in 67 countries, then designed how AI shows up across four of its product surfaces.

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None of our usability studies caught this. The people it affected most had stopped using the product the way we designed it, so they never showed up in the data.

Self-Service Resignation explore hub showing alternative pathways for employees

Amazon · A to Z app

Self-Service Resignation

Redesigning how employees quit

Resigning used to mean a form and a confirmation screen. I ran the leadership workshops, built the business case, and pushed for a flow that shows people their other options and treats the ones who still leave with respect.

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“Growth” kept coming up in exit conversations. What people usually meant was access to training on other teams.

Discovery Education Studio board with student-created content

Discovery Education

Discovery Education Studio

30% more repeat student engagement

Teachers and students were emailing, downloading and re-uploading files just to work together. I led the design of Studio: shared boards where a class can create together and see each other’s cursors move live, on whatever device they have.

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The first version handed everyone every control. We ended up hiding most of it behind sensible defaults and letting people reach for more.

02 Latest writing

· Perspective · 3 min read

Your usability tests can’t see the users who already left

On Amazon’s employee document platform, a lot of employees with disabilities had stopped using the product the way we designed it. Our research never flagged it, because it only studied the people who were still using it.

Read the article →
All writing →

03 More work

  • AI evaluation & design Amazon · Owned the bar AI features ship against: accuracy 76% → 93%, restricted-document errors 4.1% → 0.6% →
  • Media player redesign Discovery Education · Short design cycles on the video player students use most →
  • Discovery Education Home Discovery Education · New homepage and navigation for the whole platform; profile setup completion 7% → 21% →