This year I started mentoring interns which made me think about my time as a design student. I realized there is so much that I wish I knew in design school which could have accelerated my growth as a designer.

1. Design is always user-centric

Recently I got an opportunity to speak with 40+ product owners and their team across Wipro about Design Sprints. The aim was to make them aware of Design Sprints as a method to drive innovation and its relevance in the digital landscape. Here I list down 5 takeaways from my talk.

1. What is Design Sprint and why product teams should be doing it?

It’s been a year that I’ve shifted from working on projects to working on a product. This is my ‘10 step UX workflow’ after learning from both the models that ensure you create products that are loved by the users.

01. Understanding Research Insights

Why does building trust matter?

Artificial intelligence is becoming an inseparable part of our lives. We use AI-powered products and services every day — some more visible, like Amazon’s Alexa and chatbots, to the behind-the-scenes AI that powers our phones, social media feeds, and online advertising.

Sure, Alexa doesn’t make life-changing decisions for us. But when we inject AI into products like an autonomous car, it becomes crucial that we trust that system. And what about when we start to apply AI to more and more uses, in more and more industries? Imagine if you could receive medical care through a virtual doctor — you…

I started the year with an intent of reading at least one book each month. Here is my write-up on the 6 books that I read in 2018 and how they influenced me as a designer.

Sapiens: A brief history of humankind

Yuval Harari has enthrallingly presented the account of human history. He surveys the history of humankind from the evolution of archaic human species in the Stone Age up to the twenty-first century, focusing on Homo sapiens.

He explains how Homo sapiens came to dominate the world, moving from the middle of the food chain to the top. The main reason he argues is that…

I started my career as a brand designer before moving to digital experience design and when last year I got an opportunity to work on a loyalty program, I was thrilled. One of the leading US-based CPG brand approached us to create a pitch for the next generation of their loyalty program and I was on-boarded to the team as the lead experience designer.

Before diving into project details I would start with the basics of branding as the aim of a loyalty program is to increase brand remembrance with its customers.

Brand = Emotions + Remembrance

A loyalty program…

Early this year I started working on a search tool that was being developed for a UK based enterprise. The high-level brief was to build a search tool that would index data stored in the form of millions of documents, images, text, videos, etc. This data is stored in different servers all over the world and we had to make this data easily accessible to the employees while keeping data security in mind.

I joined the team as Lead Experience Designer. My job was to understand what the employees wanted through design research and feed in all those insights into…