If you'd asked 8-year-old me what I wanted to be, I'd have said "newspaper fashion designer." Scissors in one hand, glue in the other, The Times of India in pieces on the floor. I genuinely believed I was making haute couture. One badly taped neckline at a time. That was my first taste of design. Not the polished, portfolio-ready kind. The messy, make-believe, "look what I made!" kind. It wasn't about grids or flows, it was about feeling something. That part hasn't changed.
I didn't plan to end up in UX. I started in graphic design, convinced I'd land in animation or VFX. But somewhere between kerning fonts for wall calendars nobody asked for and watching people struggle with software they used every single day, something shifted. Beautiful things stopped being enough. I needed them to work. I needed them to mean something to the person actually using them. So I switched. And for the first time, my particular kind of chaos had a context.
Here's what I've learned that I didn't know when I started. Design is political.
Someone always has the power in a room and it shifts constantly, sometimes it's the stakeholder, sometimes it's a single line from a user interview that quietly rewrites everything. Knowing how to hold that tension and still make sure the person using the product isn't forgotten, that's the actual job. The Figma is just how you show your working. The details aren't small. The half-second of confusion, the error message that makes you feel stupid, the flow that's one step too long, these are the moments that decide whether someone trusts a product or quietly resents it.
I find those moments. I don't let them go until they're fixed. And good design is mostly listening. To users, yes. But also to developers who know what breaks. To PMs who know what the business needs. To the silence in a usability session when someone can't find something and doesn't want to say so.
Then AI arrived and the industry had a bit of a moment. I had mine too, briefly.
Then I actually started using it and I realized it was the best thinking partner I'd ever had for the parts of design that were always just mechanics. Getting ideas out of my head fast. Exploring directions I'd have talked myself out of. Moving quickly enough to spend more time on the parts that actually need a human. It doesn't notice the half-second pause before someone clicks. It doesn't feel the tension in a room when a stakeholder says one thing and means another. It doesn't take a user's frustration personally enough to fix it at midnight. That's still my job.
AI just means I get to spend more time doing it. Honestly, a step up from my previous thinking partner a very patient rubber duck named Gerald. I use it every day. As a catalyst. The thinking is still mine.
So who am I, really?
I'm Shravani. I cry over bad interfaces. I rewrite microcopy like it matters, because it does. I believe error messages should feel like someone's on your side. I will fight for the user nobody thought to design for, and the story nobody thought to tell.
I use AI to move faster. I use empathy to move better.
I'm not here to make shiny things. I'm here to make things that feel like someone was paying close attention.
Because I was.
I always am.
