My journey so far

How I got here

• 1. Freelance Designing

  It all started in college when I took up the task of designing promotional material for our college fest. I was teaching myself photoshop at the time. This felt like a good oppurtunity to further enhance my skills. Students, parents and the staff really liked my designs which led to some interesting leads. With adequate demand, I started my freelance career. I designed multiple assets for both print and screen. It is here that I first learnt various design principles and techniques. I also learnt about various context, domains, industries and their unique requirements. While working with a start-up, I was introduced to coding which led me to my next creative phase.

• 2. Sunlabs Software Pvt Ltd

  After being introduced to coding, I started to teach myself front end development. I realised I found this as interesting as designing and wished to explore further. In an attempt of achieving this, I joined Sunlabs Software Pvt Ltd a mid sized IT firm in Mumbai. Here, I worked as a web designer/developer. While UX design was not as formalized back then, my role included responsibilities of a UX designer as well. My responsibilities included requirement gathering, conceptualization, wireframing, visual design, development and final deployment. Eventually I also learnt PHP and MySQL to build custom CMS tools and other backend requirements. In due course I was also involved in pricing and sales which gave me a better grasp on business context and point of view.

• 3. Tata Consultancy Services

  I joined TCS in 2013. Here, I designed CXO facing content. I also developed some tools to optimize the process across the team. I realised that the role of a UX designer best leveraged my skills. I joined a UX CoE and have been working as a dedicated UX designer ever since. My role involved understanding business requirements, conducting contextual enquiries, extracting user goals and needs, wireframing, prototype and user testing. I also overlooked visual design and development to ensure 100% alignment with business and user needs. I also conducted research in various areas that lead to paper publications, speaker engagements and patent grants. I had a key focus on UX practices for emerging technologies like blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things and Conversational Interfaces.

• 4. John Deere

  In 2022, I transitioned to John Deere which is a manufacturing company. Here, I focus on enhancing the experience of various dealer and customer facing applications. These include a dealer facing information portal, a customer configuration tool, a dealer locator and the main deere.com website. However, my primary focus currently, is on redesigning the core deere.com experience. I am also involved in parallelly building a design system to ensure consistency across applications. My role involves collaborating with product managers, scrum masters, and developers, to ensure UX aligns with business needs and is implemented as intended. I also work closely with UX researchers for activities like user tests and surveys to better inform design decisions. Lastly, I often conduct UX awareness sessions with various stakeholders to deepen UX implementation across departments.