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Lucila Di Vanni Frick
Hola, I'm Lu

All roads lead to UX.
Mine had a few stopovers.

For a long time I thought it had taken me forever to get here. It had not: I had been doing this in every job I ever had, without the word for it. Mercado Libre eventually gave me the name for how I already worked. Continuous beta: try it, watch it, change it, try it again. My career is what it is because of that, and I would not give back a single step of it.

The stopovers

What I took out of each one

Fifteen years of working, most of the early ones while studying. Each of these was a hypothesis about what I wanted next, and each one brought me closer to what came after. No dates or titles here, those are on the CV.

  • Starbucks🇦🇷 Buenos Aires · Retail

    My first job, while studying. Trying to make every customer feel welcome and to recommend the right thing for each of them, while remembering that you are not the user.

  • RestorandoNow TripAdvisor🇦🇷 Buenos Aires · Marketplace

    Customer care for people who had had a bad night at a restaurant, and for restaurant staff who suddenly had a system to use. Also where I wrote my first HTML, so our emails could have images in them. Everything technical I know has arrived the same way since.

  • Licencias OnLine🇦🇷 Buenos Aires · B2B tech distribution

    Landing pages, campaigns, AdWords, and where measuring started. Metrics, what was working and what was not, and my first A/B tests.

  • Mercado Libre🇦🇷 Buenos Aires · Marketplace and logistics

    The best school in UX I could have asked for. Research run properly, and the discovery that words are not a layer on top of a product. Continuous beta came from here too.

  • UX Studio🇭🇺 Budapest · Design agency

    My first job outside Argentina, and where I found out that not every agency client wants a bigger logo. Some want a compliance product nobody had defined yet. BlackRock came along fast and I took it. Part of me wishes I had given agency life longer.

  • BlackRock🇭🇺 Budapest · Asset management

    Almost everything I know about accessibility comes from here, along with what a delivery standard looks like in a heavily regulated industry. I still build libraries the way I learned there.

  • Jimdo🇩🇪 Munich, fully remote · SaaS

    A remote team spread across several countries, where I saw how much further a group gets when the people in it do not think alike. Also how to improve something that already works.

What did not change

Retail, a marketplace, B2B distribution, an agency, asset management, SaaS. Seven places and not much in common, except the person on the other side of the screen. Every one of them was somebody at work.

Not people who chose to open the thing. People who had to use it to do their job, usually in a hurry, usually answerable to somebody else for the result. I did not plan that and I am not going to pretend I did. But once I saw it, it stopped being a coincidence and started being what I look for.

The year off

I took a year, deliberately

I left Jimdo when I could no longer see what the next challenge there would be. Two country moves, several industries, three languages and a few teams had stacked up by then, so instead of going straight into the next thing I finally put time into what I had been postponing for years.

Nine months went almost entirely into German, up to B2. Then a trip home to Argentina. After that I came back to UX deliberately: the courses I never had room for while working full time, hands on with AI, and an app I designed and built end to end for an animal rescue.

What it settled

Where I want to go next. What moves me is impact I can feel, either because the company is doing something that matters, health, climate, social, or because it is small enough that what I make visibly lands. And I would take a hard problem in a field I know nothing about over a comfortable one in a field I do.

Based in: Munich, Germany
Work status: Italian citizen, no sponsorship needed in the EU
Languages: Spanish (native), English C1, German B2, Italian A1, Portuguese A2
Curious about: startups, health, climate, social impact
Currently · Q3 2026

My own board, roughly honest

Continuous beta is easier to show than to claim.

Backlog 2

A blanket for my sofa

Personal

Adopt a pet. Ongoing negotiation

Personal

In progress 4

Finding a role in an industry I care about, where the job is not just pushing pixels

ProfessionalPriority: High

German. B2, shipping daily with known bugs

Professional

Moving the rescue app off FlutterFlow and into code, while the volunteers keep using the version that already works

Projects

More IxDF courses, because the list keeps growing

Professional

Shipped 5

An operations app for a rescue, built alone and for free

Projects

Object Oriented UX, at the IxDF

Professional

AI for Designers, at the IxDF

Professional

This portfolio, rebuilt from scratch with Claude as a very opinionated pair

Projects

Two knitting workshops, and the decision not to monetise a hobby

Personal
The rest of it

I move fast without losing structure

Argentina taught me the first part and Germany the second, and the combination has held up in startups, in an agency and in a large regulated organization. At home the phrase is that I am too Argentinian for Germany and too German for Argentina. My passport is Italian, which explains the pizza.

Season
Winter, no questions
Series
Ted Lasso
Film
Gladiator
Book
The Little Prince
Food
Pizza, see above

“I suppose the best brand is being yourself.”Leslie Higgins – Ted Lasso

Current versionStill shipping. v1.0 · 1991The curiosity made it to production. The guitar stayed in the MVP.

If you have read this far, you care about the person as much as the professional, and I am grateful for that. It is the same thing I am looking for: somewhere that thinks about people, including the ones who work there.