Hey, I am Nicolas El Azzi,
Design Lead,
Service and Product Designer,
Living in Paris and Nice.

Delivering impactful products to your users

Me myself and I

Where do you come from?

Born in Paris, I’m half French and half Lebanese. However, I’ve lived in Cannes, Nice, Bahrain, and recently in Sydney, so maybe I’m just a citizen of the planet!


What’s your favorite dish?

Even if you’ll more likely to find me around pastry shops, I’ll go with a Lebanese tabouli with marinated chicken in lemon and garlic. FYI I won’t say no to a delicious Chef meal!


Who’s your favorite super hero?

Acknowledging that Harry Potter is not a superhero, perhaps Iron Man? He’s got lots of devices I could play with… And he can fly!


How do you relax?

When I need to cool down: I’ll go right to my headphones and put on my favorite Spotify playlist (Indie Rock). Singing or diving is also relaxing; alternatively bike riding is good for an RPM workout although it doesn’t compare to my Sydney boxfit session on the beach.


How about travel?

I would love to pin every country on my TripAdvisor map! Wandering around new landscapes or cities, discovering ancient ruins or wildlife, understanding other cultures are fascinating and something I’d like to turn into a book one day.

My background

In my 19 years of experience, I have gained and developed a design expertise by matching user needs to business objectives.

My experiences in France and abroad, have allowed me to work at different stages of the design process, and directly with all levels of the corporate ladder.
I have learned to establish and maintain a relationship of trust with my clients, and work with diverse teams, cultivating and promoting the feeling of accomplishing something together.
Inspired by the design thinking model and the lean startup one, I co-build a product or a service by bringing the solution’s most delightful experience for the users while supporting business growth.

Crafting and implementing processes that improve team skills and responsiveness while supporting business growth is a great challenge that motivates me and provides me with great personal fulfillment.

My approach

When we talk about User Experience Design, we often refer to UX Design, Service Design or Product Design. That's why I’d rather talk about Experience Design. In my opinion: everything is connected.
Product design aims to build the best possible digital user experience by taking into account the company’s business challenges in addition to the user needs and by having a global vision of the product when making decisions.
Service Design aims to deliver the best possible product experience by designing customer interactions across all devices, digital or not, and backstage processes.
Ultimately, this global experience should live in a coherent ecosystem and carry the brand values.

To create a product with great value, I use an iterative approach:

1. Context

To build a good product or service, it is important to have a clear vision of the organization, its values and understand its ecosystem.


2. Empathy

In order to gain insight from the people I am designing for, I engage with them through observation or interview to understand their experiences and motivations and learn about their area of concern.


3. Define

I analyze and synthesize the insights collected in order to define the core problem. Then, thanks to collaborative workshops, I identify pain points and opportunities. It will help establish features, contents or other elements that will allow users to resolve issues themselves with the minimum of difficulty.


4. Ideate

With all the elements gathered and synthesized during the previous steps, it is time to identify solutions to the problem and start visualizing it by leading ideation workshops. The main objective of these workshops is to generate all possible ideas to solve the problems encountered.


5. Prototype

It is time to get hands-on and produce the first iteration of the MVP in order to see whether certain ideas set out above are feasible or not and whether changes need to be made.


6. Test

Testing with users is the best way to know if the product is approved. The prototype is evaluated from a customer desirability and a producer perspective. User feedback may provide a new vision.


7. Learn

After closely observing people, there should be enough information to see how the results fit into the bigger picture. Did the solution work as intended? Are further improvements necessary? Depending on the results, you'll be able to go back to previous steps to foster innovation.