About | Dhanashree B

The human side of technology,

I'm a Product Designer drawn to complex problems, emerging technology, and the human decisions behind them. My work sits at the intersection of people, technology, and business, shaped by a journey that began in visual design and evolved through UX into product design.

That path taught me to move beyond how things look toward how people think, behave, and interact with systems, turning questions into clarity, ideas into experiences, and complexity into products people can actually use.

Today, I work across enterprise technology, healthcare, fintech, commerce, automotive, and AI, adapting to different domains while staying grounded in the same principles:

understand the problem, challenge assumptions, and design with intent.

01 Process, Practice & Tools

How I turn complex problems into clear, scalable product experiences

UX Strategy & Operating Models

Operating models & governance, experience architecture at scale.

Figma

Miro

Jira

Notion

Research-Led Discovery

User insights through interviews, heuristic evaluation, affinity mapping.

Maze

GA4

Amplitude

UserTesting

AI Tools &

Emerging Tech

Trust architecture, explainable AI, confidence systems, error flows.

Claude

Cursor

ChatGPT

Figma AI

Lovable

Design Systems & Craft

WCAG 2.1 component libraries, design tokens, motion, interaction craft.

Figma

Sketch

ProtoPie

Principle

Adobe CC

02 Background and Experience

Education

MS Human Computer Interaction · Indiana University

GPA 3.9 / 4.0 · Indianapolis, IN

BDes User Experience · MIT World Peace University
Minors: Design Strategy & Innovation, Service & Business Design

GPA 8.95 / 10 · Pune, India

Professional Journey

Early 2025 · Now

Senior Lead - Digital, UX and AI · Greenworks Tools

$100M+ DTC Commerce Platform · AI Interaction Design · Charlotte, NC

DTC commerce at scale operates with razor-thin conversion margins; every point of friction in the purchase funnel is measurable revenue loss. At a $100M+ platform size, IA decisions and AI interaction models aren't UX problems; they're business-critical infrastructure. Most design teams get called in after the funnel breaks. The challenge was to embed design upstream before it did.

Built the UX operating model, research standards, and AI interaction framework from scratch, establishing governance across AI-Garage, PLP, PDP, cart, checkout, loyalty, and account.
Ran full-funnel CRO-informed IA redesign, implemented behavioral diagnostics and A/B experimentation cycles, and designed the end-to-end AI trust signal architecture, so AI features earned user confidence before they could affect purchasing decisions.

~15–17% digital revenue lift

2%+ sustained conversion improvement

~12% cart abandonment reduction

~20% engagement increase

AI interaction model designed

2024 · 2025

Lead UX Designer · Village.Co

B2B + B2C SaaS Platform · PLG Activation · Remote US

Early-stage SaaS products fail most often not from bad ideas, but from UX that never surfaces the value fast enough. Onboarding drop-off is a silent revenue killer; users churn before reaching the moment that would make them stay. As the first and only designer, there was no existing UX infrastructure, no validated research, and no framework connecting design decisions to business outcomes.

Built UX infrastructure from the ground up - 40+ user interviews and 10+ usability studies grounded every decision before a wireframe was drawn.
Restructured core IA and redesigned the activation flow end-to-end using progressive disclosure and time-to-value reduction.
Delivered annotation-rich Figma systems that eliminated engineering ambiguity — closing the design-to-delivery gap that had been the primary velocity bottleneck.

~30% feature adoption increase

~20% platform engagement growth

~60% delivery velocity improvement

2023 · 2024

Design Technologist - UX · Yanfeng (Tesla · Jeep · Toyota)

Automotive HMI · Android Automotive OS · Novi, MI

In-vehicle interfaces that overload drivers with cognitive demand don't just fail usability standards; they create measurable safety risk. Automotive HMI operates under a constraint most UX designers never encounter: every interaction decision must be defensible in a context where the user is in motion, attention is fractured, and the consequences of failure are physical. Designing for Android Automotive OS across multi-display, safety-critical environments for three OEM partners simultaneously required a research rigour that consumer UX rarely demands.

Conducted 50+ usability and behavioral studies measuring cognitive load, task performance, and AAOS safety compliance, establishing a research-backed foundation for every interaction decision.
Applied cognitive load analysis and in-motion testing protocols to constrain and validate interface complexity before it reached production.

50+ behavioral studies

AAOS-aligned across 3 OEM partners

Human-machine Interaction

Safety-critical cognitive load research

Autonomous Vehicle Experiences

2021 · 2022

Lead UX Designer · Propero (Shopify)

E-Commerce & Retail UX · Shopify Platforms · Pune, India

Commerce UX without a consistent process creates quality variance that compounds at scale; each inconsistent handoff creates rework, and every unclear spec adds development time. For a consultancy managing multiple simultaneous Shopify product launches, the absence of a shared UX framework was the single biggest drag on delivery quality and time-to-market.

Designed and shipped Shopify-based B2B and B2C storefronts applying CRO-informed IA, branding, content hierarchy, and user-centered checkout patterns.
Established standardised UX processes, wireframing templates, and engineering handoff documentation across all client engagements, building a repeatable system that eliminated variance.

~40% reduction in design iteration cycles

Consistent time-to-market across launches

2021 · 2022

UX Designer · Lentra AI (HDFC · ICICI · Axis Bank)

Fintech · B2B Enterprise Lending · Pune, India

Financial UX operates under a dual constraint that most product designers never confront simultaneously: the workflow must be simple enough for users navigating high-stakes decisions, and compliant enough to pass regulatory audit. AI-assisted lending platforms for India's largest private banks added a third constraint, the AI output had to be comprehensible to loan officers who were not technologists.

Applied user-centred design and iterative wireframing within compliance boundaries to simplify multi-step lending and loan-management workflows.
Collaborated cross-functionally with Engineering, Sales, Marketing, and Innovation teams, aligning UX decisions with commercial and technical requirements and reducing development timelines while improving adoption.

~25% product adoption improvement

~30% user retention improvement

~40–50% development timeline reduction

Mumbai, IN

MIT Media Lab · India Initiative × Harvard

Public Transit UX · Behavioural Design · Social Impact

Fragmented public transit UX was creating accessibility and usability barriers for 30M+ multilingual commuters, a population that spans literacy levels, languages, and digital fluency.

The constraint: improving usability without rebuilding infrastructure. No new systems, no budget for new hardware. Purely design-led behaviour change within the existing environment.

Led a cross-institution design initiative applying design thinking, systems thinking, and nudge-based behavioural interventions to improve transit usability at a population scale.
Collaborated with MIT and Harvard researchers to ground every intervention in evidence, translating academic behavioural economics into applied UX decisions.

30M+ commuters served

~60% user retention improvement

Nudge-based accessibility interventions