Philadelphia, PA

Ilona

Belous

Strategist

UX

I’ve spent the last 6+ years working across UX strategy, research, and product, facilitating tough cross-functional alignment, driving early discovery, and setting up the structure needed to get complex products off the ground.

Beyond making the implicit explicit and the indigestible digestible, I’ve also spent a lifetime mapping journeys and experiences. No, seriously. As a kid, I mapped an entire imaginary neighborhood.

If you think we’d be a good fit, let’s chat about what ideas are worth mapping next.

Captured by my dear friend and photographer, Erica Kruk.

You’ll often find the mark of spilled coffee across my journals.

Career

Highlights

At KW, I drove strategic UX design for multiple critical product initiatives that progressively unlocked a bridge between the KW consumer site with the real estate agent CRM platform, creating engagement opportunities for 100K+ agents with 3M+ monthly site visitors.

As a freelance UX designer, I partnered with small-to-mid stage startups to design products in AI SaaS, Marketing, Pharma & Healthcare targeting product-market fit.

With tech startup founder Peter Yeargin, we worked closely to reimagine and launch multiple projects off the ground, most notably Sage SEO, an AI Marketing platform that boosted small business presence on search engines (before the AI boom).
With the team at Innovative Supply Solutions, I navigated complex pharma regulations, competing priorities, and stakeholder misalignment, all while introducing some of the first-ever design thinking approaches to the team.
With UX Woman founder and friend, Samaya Sinha, I revamped and taught the UXD portion of the curriculum to over 90+ students entering the design field. With the new UXD curriculum in place, the quality of student work dramatically improved, showcasing a high bar of craft and strategic thought.
With Kurbo by WW, I anchored early product discovery and UX research efforts, providing cross-functional teams with a grounded, human-centered foundation to guide feature validation and product growth.

At Redeemer Health, I owned end-to-end service design across digital and physical touchpoints for transitional housing and food pantry programs. Navigating COVID-19 restrictions, I introduced agile service blueprints and journey mapping that preserved member dignity while smoothing operational and experience gaps.

Browse Resume

Product Thinking

Expert Facilitation‍ ‍

Strategic Discovery

What I Do

Best

Years of platform unification finally unlocked the opportunity to build a cross-platform Comparative Market Analysis experience, but creating an experience agents would adopt required navigating competing priorities, market positioning, and the realities of connecting consumer and enterprise systems.

An elevator analogy became the key to simplifying complex pharmaceutical software, shifting teams stuck in technical language, clinical trial rules, and low UX maturity.

Creating thousands of branded websites (and one very important website) was nearly effortless with these three strategic UX decisions. As a result, thousands of lifeless real estate agent websites were transformed into professional brands practically overnight.

Browse All Work

In the business of figuring it out, together.

One of Ilona’s greatest strengths is her ability to bring people together around a shared understanding of the problem. She facilitates conversations that bridge product, engineering, research, and design perspectives, helping teams move forward even when priorities or constraints create complexity.

“

Ty Taylor • UX & Product Leader

Off The

Clock

You’ll find me exploring, coordinating, and curating.

To me, the dance of coordinating a dinner party or curating a room is just another way of bringing mismatched pieces, ideas, and people together intentionally to build an experience that just clicks.

I recently hosted a Mexi-Italian birthday mashup, La Dolce Fiesta. Inspired by a local Mexican-owned pizza place and Italian salad plates, the rest came together surprisingly easily. If you haven’t had an affogato with churros, I highly urge you to try it.