Sr. Product Designer
Other
Available for hire
Years of
experience
6+ years
Experience
level
Mid-level
Available
for
Full-time
With 6+ years of experience as a UI/UX and Product Designer across enterprise tools, education platforms, and AI‑driven products, I specialize in designing clean, scalable interfaces for mobile apps, 0→1 products, websites, and dashboards. Focuses on refining onboarding flows, simplifying complex workflows, and building design systems that improve task success and reduce drop‑offs while keeping accessibility and product goals front and center.
🌐 Portfolio: https://www.akankush.com/
Works closely with AI teams to turn model outputs into trustworthy, usable experiences, designing review workflows for model predictions, crafting patterns for explaining “why” behind AI decisions, and creating feedback loops that help models and users get better over time. Cares a lot about where AI meets humans: transparency, error states, guardrails, and the small interaction details that build or break trust.
Collaborates closely with PMs and engineers in iterative sprints, moving from research and problem framing to prototyping, usability testing, and launch. Leans on WCAG 2.2, responsive design, and design systems to keep experiences consistent, accessible, and easy to evolve.
✉️ Email: [email protected]
Skills
Languages
Employment History
Sr. Product Designer / UX Expert at
Mercor, Seattle, USA
Current
2025
-
Now
• Led 500+ monthly AI-powered interface reviews, evaluating usability, design quality, and conversational experiences, achieving 45%+ design assessment accuracy using structured methodologies and design heuristics.
• Evaluated product designs for WCAG 2.2 compliance, training AI/ML models to flag accessibility violations with 72%+ precision and reducing compliance issues by 35% in follow-up testing.
• Mentored 14 cross-functional designers on critique frameworks and evaluation methods, driving 40% improvement in design assessment consistency and elevating product-wide design quality standards across monthly reviews.
• Developing comprehensive design assessment guidelines and interaction pattern documentation, which reduced subjective bias in AI training data by 33% and established scalable evaluation frameworks adopted across design teams.
• Partnered with product managers and engineers to define quality benchmarks for generative AI interfaces, presenting design goals to leadership, boosting cross-team alignment 28% and accelerating review cycles 35%.
Product Designer at
Indiana University - Purdue University IUPUI, Indianapolis, Indiana
2023
-
2025
• Redesigned subscription and onboarding flows using scenario-driven Figma prototypes, boosting completion rates by 28% and reducing drop-offs by 19% across student portal subscriptions for 30,000+ students.
• Led research with 45+ subscribers, creating personas and journey maps that revealed onboarding, payment, and renewal friction, driving design patterns adopted across 3 subscription products.
• Led Agile design sprints with researchers, engineers, product managers, and designers to iterate on subscription management interfaces and retention strategies, achieving a 15% increase in subscription renewal rates.
• Facilitated 12+ usability testing sessions evaluating onboarding effectiveness, identifying key friction points through task analysis and heuristic evaluation, and implementing changes that reduced drop-offs by 19%.
• Delivered 25+ high-fidelity mockups, interactive prototypes, and detailed design specifications with redlines for iOS and desktop platforms, ensuring design-to-development handoff to engineering teams in two-week sprint cycles.
• Implemented WCAG 2.2 accessibility standards across platforms using inclusive design principles, ensuring accessible onboarding experiences that increased engagement from users with disabilities by 30% and achieved 100% AA compliance.
Lead Designer at
WASP International
2022
-
2023
• Owned product design for enterprise web and mobile dashboards and task systems, defining strategy and requirements using design systems and user research to raise task success 37% for 5,000+ users.
• Owned unified Figma and Storybook design system with component libraries, design tokens, and patterns, standardizing UI across 4 enterprise products, cutting visual QA bugs 20% and accelerating delivery 44%.
• Developed information architecture and design patterns for complex enterprise workflows, user interactions, and data visualization that were adopted across multiple applications, achieving 85% component reuse rate and establishing design quality standards.
• Led usability testing with 60+ global users across 8 markets; applied journey mapping and task analysis to reduce onboarding drop-offs by 45% and increase task completion by 37%.
• Conducted cross-functional design critiques and async reviews, presented design direction to executives, mentored 3 junior designers on design systems, and aligned product teams on unified design vision.
• Led A/B testing for key user flows and feature variations, analyzing behavior metrics to validate design hypotheses, inform product roadmap, and lift feature engagement rates by 18%.
Product Designer at
Welkin Marketing Management
2021
-
2022
• Designed responsive UIs for iOS, Android, and web using atomic design and mobile-first workflows, boosting SUS scores by 40% across customer-facing interfaces for 10,000+ users.
• Developed interactive prototypes and detailed design specifications for 15+ product features, increasing feature adoption by 25% and conducted design validation through user feedback, A/B testing, and iterative design processes.
• Engineered a cross-platform Figma design token system, streamlining Figma Inspect–Jira workflows, enabling rapid prototyping, cutting design-to-code handoff by 60%, and ensuring consistent UI across iOS and Android.
• Conducted heuristic evaluations of product interfaces against established UX principles and usability guidelines, identifying 18+ friction points, and partnered with engineering teams to implement user experience improvements.
• Performed design QA with front-end engineers using HTML/CSS knowledge, debugging UI implementation issues and negotiating technical constraints, thus reducing design rework by 30% and improving design-to-development fidelity.
• Collaborated with product managers and engineers in Agile sprints to ship 15+ features end-to-end, presenting design rationale and aligning vision, driving 35% growth in monthly active users over 12 months.
UI / UX Designer at
Hewlett Packard Inc.
2018
-
2020
• Designed 20+ internal application interfaces in Figma and Adobe XD for dashboards and workflow tools, simplifying complex problems and increasing enterprise adoption by 45% through effective visual design.
• Built reusable design assets and standardized design workflows, reducing iteration loops by 40% and improving design team productivity by enabling faster prototyping cycles.
• Led design system initiatives, establishing component patterns and naming conventions that enabled teams to work more effectively on enterprise applications.
• Facilitated workshops on design thinking and user-centric design principles, promoting UX maturity and adoption across teams.
Education
Masters of Human Computer Interaction at
Indiana University - Purdue University
2023
-
2025
Bachelors of Computer Science Engineering at
Visvesvaraya Technology University - CMRIT,
2014
-
2017