Eric Thivierge
Staff Product Designer
Summary
Staff Product Designer with 9 years at Apple across developer tooling, spatial computing, and native macOS features, contributing to a 10+ year career designing software for audiences from first‑time users to technical professionals. Turns ambiguous problems into scalable systems and builds intuitive reusable patterns. Speaks credibly about how complex systems work, earning the trust that keeps design and engineering moving as one team.
Highlights
- Builds scalable, reusable design patterns that extend beyond a single feature to meet evolving product needs, from Reality Composer Pro's developer tooling to an internal AI assistant's GenUI template/dispatcher framework.
- Keeps interaction patterns, terminology, and platform conventions consistent across concurrent iOS, macOS, and visionOS product areas built by separate teams.
- Revisits contentious calls, aligning leadership, engineering, and Apple's Human Interface team on the fix.
- Works in the codebase, not just the design file, building workflows by hand and with agentic coding tools.
Skills
Product & Strategy: Product Design · Systems Thinking · 0‑to‑1 / Ambiguous Problem Spaces
Craft & Systems: UI/UX & Interaction Design · Information Architecture · Design Systems · Design Ops
Prototyping & Engineering: Rapid Prototyping (Swift/SwiftUI, Xcode, HTML/CSS) · Design Engineering · Python
Platform & AI: Developer Tools & Platform Design · Agentic/LLM & AI‑Powered UX
Tools & Collaboration: Design Tools (Figma, Sketch) · Cross‑Functional & Engineering Collaboration
Experience
- Made 3D content approachable for everyday Mac users in Preview's Spatial Preview feature, trimming the deeply‑nested native property set of USD (Universal Scene Description) by ~20% while keeping controls consistent with standard Mac conventions.
- Led design of Reality Composer Pro's Swift Package project format and Entity UX, partnering with Apple's Developer Tools Human Interface team to align it with the broader developer‑tools ecosystem and bring the app to public‑launch quality.
- Designed Reality Composer Pro's Component and System workflow, then built the working prototype for Keynote's immersive Environments transition effect with engineering, carrying a developer‑tools system into a shipping iWork feature.
- Held Spatial Preview to Apple's quality bar with QA and engineering, naming interaction and workflow gaps directly in critiques and leadership reviews rather than letting them ship.
- Identified an unmet need for production coordinators to move data in and out of an internal 3D app for pipeline handoff, and advocated for it through mockups and leadership review, shaping the adopted feature's direction.
- Designed the state and selection model in Reality Composer Pro's Skeleton Editor, covering disabled, deleted, and error states, plus error handling and 3D import for a sibling creative app.
- Built and standardized the tokens, primitives, and HIG lint pass that made the team's prototypes compliant by default, then packaged it as a Claude Code plugin adopted across the design team.
- Identified a bottleneck in the design team's spec‑delivery process and built an internal tool that cut that recurring task by ~90%.
- Tested shipped content‑creation apps as their actual user, drawing on a decade as a working technical artist before Apple to target the highest‑risk interactions.
- Drove macOS design for an internal AI assistant that uses Mail and Calendar as data sources to schedule, send messages, and keep track of work, including the permissions model that lets users control what it can act on.
- Designed a GenUI template and dispatcher system for that assistant, rendering model responses as structured UI cards built from predefined and model‑generated components.
- Cut AI assistant response load time 25% by redesigning how tool‑use calls were batched into a single render pass.
- Built workflows directly in the codebase with agentic coding tools, and wrote a custom Claude MCP that feeds AI‑generated mock data into Sketch mockups.
- Facilitated working sessions and weekly design critiques with stakeholders, engineering leadership, and the senior program sponsors who own product direction, working through misalignment to land a shared direction.
- Caught a simplification pass that left Spatial Preview's Transforms and Lights hard to tell apart, and won agreement on a correction from engineering, leadership, and Apple's Human Interface team before it shipped.
- Mentored 2 designers who shipped features independently and took on increased scope.
- Interviewed candidates for the design team as well as sibling design and technical teams, then onboarded incoming designers on how the team works with engineering and leadership.
- Shaped Reality Composer's early UX, the first tool letting developers author spatial content for RealityKit, by designing its Behavior Editor and working with the design team on the app's overall UI/UX across its iOS, iPadOS, and macOS releases.
- Developed a production‑ready open‑source rigging framework, Kraken, with a custom node‑based canvas editor built on core Fabric Engine APIs.
- Owned UI consistency across the standalone Fabric Engine app and DCC plug‑ins (Maya, Softimage, 3ds Max).
Prior Experience
imdb.com/name/nm4675424Technical Director across Animation & VFX studios (2007–2017): built character rigs and developed custom tools and plug‑ins to streamline production pipelines at Hybride, Animal Logic (now Netflix Animation), and SpeakeasyFX, including independently co‑creating and selling the Species rigging plug‑in.
Credits: Arrival (Academy Award winner), Warcraft, and Sesame Street's Abby's Flying Fairy School.
Patents & Publications
- 10 granted U.S. patents for Apple, plus 2 more pending, spanning 3D object manipulation, spatial interaction, and creative‑workflow tooling: Rigging an Object, Varying Snap Location Densities in an Environment, and Animating a Virtual Object (pending).
- Species rigging plug‑in featured in 3D World magazine, April 2012.