Hi! I’m Devanshi, an experience designer ✨

💭 Psychology → ✍🏼 Design

In 2017, I was in school and studied psychology which made me curious about how other people think & perceive the world. To understand this field more I read several books and listened to podcasts. Till then my knowledge of the digital world was limited to basic consumer apps that I used myself. However, one day I was listening to an episode of 99% invisible and they were talking about an app that could tell you the history of a city as you walk through it, personalised to the listener.

This idea excited me and opened up a world of new possibilities of how we interact with technology and its implications in the physical world.

📚 Exploring the world of Design

At Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bengaluru, 2019-2023, I worked across various disciplines and got my passion for visualising ideas

• Interaction design; I did many research, user experience and interface design projects. However, one the most interesting was a usability testing workshop because I started thinking about how to measure problems & successes quantitatively as well as qualitatively
• Service design, filmmaking, art history, board game design (personal favourite), information visualisation, branding, packaging design and illustration projects

👔 Work Experience

While I loved working on these college projects I really wanted to build live projects with real users. Thus began my foray into the professional world

• At Leaf Design (May 2021, 1 month, mentee, Design agency) I started learning how to use Figma and understood the importance of fundamentals in design; having a good reference deck, a strong design system (often referred to Material Design) and iterating based on feedback.
• At Hubler (Nov 2021, 4 months, intern, SaaS) the problems we were trying to solve were much more complex than I what I was used to (and hence more exciting!). As the only designer I helped design assets for the website, case studies, pitch decks and revamped the home page of their web app. It was also the first time my design was implemented and I had a dev hand off. This is when I started thinking beyond visual design; observing the business/marketing strategies, defending my designs and learning how to prioritise design changes.
• At McKinsey (June 2022, 2 months, intern) I got to work on some big projects (public sector bank & pharma) where I created many designs, learned the importance of communication and how to present ideas to clients; a part of this were design workshops for the client which I would love to try again as a research method to get feedback from users.
• At GroundUp (Nov 2023, 2 months, Ed-tech SaaS) as the only designer I took up a lot of initiative; while there were some features designed based on feedback from users I advocated for re-imagining certain aspects like the dashboard, website and ways of doing things. I was also very curious about the usage and drop-offs across features and looked at all the data from mixpanel myself to find insights.

Currently I’m freelancing, doing side projects, reading books, focusing on my health and spending time with loved ones

Also working on a side project that could use AI in dating apps, for more quality matches and meaningful activities- Sidekick