Meet the Grafana Labs team: Oana Mangiurea, a UX designer working on Grafana Cloud

As Grafana Labs continues to grow, we’d like you to get to know our team members. Check out the latest of our Friday team profiles.

Meet Oana!

Name: Oana Mangiurea

Senior UX designer Oana Mangiurea

What’s your current location/time zone?

I’m based in Bucharest, Romania - EEST (GMT+2).

What do you do at Grafana Labs?

I’m a UX Designer, working mainly on Grafana Cloud. That means I get to translate the business requirements and user needs into functional and easy-to-use interfaces. Alongside my fellow designers, I’m also involved in our DesignOps initiative, contributing to growing and evolving our design team.

I joined Grafana Labs because I was keen to work on a product that is loved by thousands of people, has a strong community behind it, and puts user research at the heart of each feature. Looks like I made the right decision, as I have encountered great design, product, and engineering teams, from whom I get to learn new things every day.

What open source projects do you contribute to?

As a designer, this is the third big project I contribute to. My first OSS contribution was 7 years ago, for a project called Bforms. We were doing Bootstrap-enabled ASP.NET MVC Controls at that time. Next came a blockchain identity wallet, and now it’s Grafana.

What are your GitHub and Twitter handles?

While there isn’t much activity on my GitHub profile these days, be sure to check my Twitter, especially if you are interested in UX and accessibility topics.

What do you like to do in your free time?

Since I moved into a house last year, my free time is mostly split between gardening and going out for very long walks or bike rides. I grow veggies and different fruit trees, and especially in spring and autumn there is lots of work that needs to be done.

What do you do to get “in the zone” when you work?

Work and more work. No really, if I feel that I am getting distracted, I just start doing the least important task on my to-do list for the week. That puts my brain in action, and in 10-15 minutes I’m good to focus on anything complicated. I’m also very analytical, so get me some technical documentation to read, have me take paper notes, and poof, 101% efficiency.

What superpowers do you wish you had?

Become invisible, because it’s been on my to-do list since watching Stargate SG-1, some very long time ago. I have to check what’s inside Cheyenne Mountain Complex. Better see with my own eyes if the gate is there or not.

What’s your Zoom virtual background and why?

Don’t have, don’t need sums it up 😎. I think I’m one of the very few who stays with the back against a plain wall, so there is nothing to hide. The ventilators on my laptop thank me for that.