My name is Ard Blok. I'm a designer from the Netherlands. Most recently, I was a senior designer at Booking.com in Amsterdam and Tel Aviv.
I thrive well in uncertain situations and have helped define and shape teams and products to get to the next level. I love to get my hands dirty and enjoy collaborating closely with other creatives, engineers, and business partners to design and build thoughtful design solutions.
How can I help? Let’s talk.
Professional
highlights
↓ Download resumeI recently left my job at Booking.com after six years. Over the years, I've worn many hats and worked on a wide range of projects. Here are a few highlights of that period that illustrate the work I've done.
New product development
In 2019 and 2020, I was part of the founding team that started the Flights division for Booking.com. Our most important task was to find product/market fit at scale.
Dreaming and defining a future state was an essential part of my work, and I prototyped, tested, and refined several critical features of our web and app platforms. Later on, my work revolved around collaborating with other designers to integrate our Flights platform into our main product and maintain design consistency.
Human-centered machine learning
In 2018 I moved from Amsterdam to Tel Aviv to help set up a new machine learning center for Booking.com with a small team. As initially the only designer, my task was to establish a designer's role in an ML office to help build human-centered ML solutions.
While we hired more designers and scaled the office to over 45 people, I became more involved in establishing design processes, regular design critique sessions, and career development for designers.
Scaling a large design organization
Booking.com went through an exciting time with rapid growth. I helped to build processes and training curriculums to scale our design team to over 200 designers.
As an Onboarding Lead, I was the first manager for new designers and engineers and guided people through their first three months at the company. During this critical time for them, I tried to establish a culture of feedback and optimism, with a clear definition of success and a support system to help them achieve it.
Designing at a massive scale for a global audience
Millions of people use Booking.com in almost every corner of the world, making designing for such a product fascinating and rewarding. I've been fortunate to design and refine many high converting parts of the product, such as the booking process and the first version of a payments component that could handle payments at a global scale.
studies
