Making technology
feel human.

I trained as an IT graduate in Mumbai. Code was the major, but the class I actually showed up for was graphic design. Same information, two layouts, and one of them just worked. That was where I started paying attention to interfaces instead of just building them.

COVID made the gap impossible to ignore. Everything moved online overnight, and the startups I worked with were UI-first by default. Ship the screen, figure out the experience later. I kept asking to talk to users before I touched a frame, and kept getting told research was a luxury we couldn't afford.

Kevin Liang's YouTube channel was where I sharpened the argument. He'd spend twenty minutes on a single interview question, walking through what most teams were skipping. I wanted to be a researcher before I wanted to be a designer.

That was the spark. The master's at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia was me chasing it, somewhere research was the default, not the fight I had to win every sprint.

I played center mid-back for my college soccer team, and was vice-captain.

Center mid-back is the position that sees the whole field. Deep enough to defend, high enough to start an attack. The job is to read what's about to happen two passes before it does.

Same instinct shows up in how I design. See the system before touching the screen. Stay close enough to the build to clean up if it goes sideways.

In 2025, every design article said the same thing. Figma Make. UX Pilot. Copilot. AI is going to change everything. For about three months I thought UX and UI were dead.

Then I started actually using the tools. They generated beautiful screens that solved nothing. They produced flows that had no idea who the user was. The gap between what the model output and what the person actually needed was huge, and that gap is exactly where a UX designer lives.

That was my shift from solution-first to pattern-finding. I used to brainstorm and design. Now I read the problem, find the pattern, and pick the right combination of tools, models, and human judgment to close the gap.

My internship at Eranova AI was where this clicked at production scale. I came in skeptical of AI in design. I left running most of my own work through it.