A
About

An engineer
who got curious
about people.

✦ The story

I'm Aastha Dabhi — a digital product designer based in Seattle. I started in computer engineering, drifted into front-end work, and eventually realized the parts of the job I cared about most were the ones happening before any code got written: talking to users, mapping flows, fighting for clarity.

Today I work primarily on B2B software and management systems — the kind of products with long onboarding flows, three personas that fight over the same screen, and a settings page nobody is proud of. I love this work. The wins are smaller and quieter than consumer design, but they compound: a good admin experience saves real hours for real people every day.

My toolkit is research and usability testing on one end, and Figma plus enough React to hold my own with engineering on the other. I think of design systems less as a deliverable and more as a long-running pact with the team that builds them.

Outside of work I like cooking food I've never made before, walking long routes to short destinations, and the very specific joy of finally fixing a confusing form.

✦ How I work

Five rules I keep
coming back to.

01

Research before opinions

If I haven't talked to at least three people who use the thing, my opinion is just decoration.

02

The boring parts should be boring

Empty states, settings, error toasts — get them out of the way fast so the unique stuff can breathe.

03

Design with the system, not around it

If a screen needs a one-off pattern, the system needs an update — not a workaround.

04

Engineering is a co-author

Handoff is not a wall. It's a conversation that started in research and continues into production.

05

Test the riskiest assumption first

Polish the safe screens at the end. Burn down the scary ones early.

✦

And one bonus rule

Stay kind. Designers who are easy to work with ship better products than designers who are clever and hard.

✦ Where I've been

Six years,
three continents.

Agency to enterprise to capstone research and back to consulting. The thread is products, not industries.

  1. Nov 2024 — Present

    Self-employed · Seattle, WA

    Independent Product Designer

    Working on design strategy projects with founders and small product teams while exploring my next full-time role. Mostly: untangling B2B workflows that grew faster than the design did.

  2. Oct 2023 — Nov 2024

    CloudIQ Technologies · Bellevue, WA

    Web Designer

    Owned the marketing site, internal admin tooling, and the visual layer of the customer console. Shipped a refreshed brand system and the first iteration of a documented component library.

  3. Jul 2022 — Oct 2023

    CloudIQ Technologies · Bellevue, WA

    UX Developer

    Embedded with a cloud-ops platform team. Designed and front-end-coded the customer console, ran research with admins and ops engineers, and built the early Storybook library that became the team's source of truth.

  4. Aug 2020 — Apr 2021

    California State University, Dominguez Hills · Carson, CA

    Student Assistant — ALCP-CEIE

    Supported students through admissions and academic procedures, ran scheduling for the academic coordinator, and got my first taste of designing systems for very real people under very real deadlines.

  5. May 2018 — May 2019

    WeTheDevelopers · Gujarat, India

    Junior UX Engineer

    Designed and implemented web and mobile apps for a portfolio of B2B clients including CTCsafety, Apixall, Avaloncotyarn, and Creationgulf. Lifted average DAU across the partner brands by ~90% over the year.

  6. Nov 2017 — Apr 2018

    WeTheDevelopers · Rajkot, India

    User Experience Designer (Intern)

    First role. Wireframes, prototypes, usability tests, and a lot of HTML/CSS. Learned how products actually get built by sitting an arm's length from the engineers building them.

✦ Toolkit

The things in
my backpack.

Design

  • Product design
  • UX/UI
  • Wireframing
  • Prototyping
  • Design systems
  • Visual design
  • Information architecture

Research

  • User interviews
  • Usability testing
  • Heuristic evaluation
  • Diary studies
  • Card sorting
  • A/B testing
  • Survey design

Build

  • HTML / CSS
  • React
  • Tailwind
  • Storybook
  • Design tokens
  • Git basics
  • DevOps fundamentals

Tools

  • Figma
  • Adobe XD
  • Sketch
  • Notion
  • Maze
  • Miro
  • Linear / Jira
Figma ✦React ✦Storybook ✦Adobe XD ✦Sketch ✦Maze ✦Miro ✦Notion ✦Linear ✦Figma ✦React ✦Storybook ✦Adobe XD ✦Sketch ✦Maze ✦Miro ✦Notion ✦Linear ✦

✦ Education

Degrees,
certificates, and so on.

Aug 2020 — May 2022

M.S. Computer Science

California State University, Dominguez Hills

Jun 2021 — Sep 2021

Google UX Design Professional Certificate

Coursera · Google

Dec 2014 — May 2017

B.E. Computer Science

Atmiya University

2011 — 2013

Diploma in Computer Engineering

Atmiya Institute of Technology & Science

★ Currently

Open to a great
full-time team.

If you're hiring a senior product designer who can also push front-end code when the moment calls for it, I'd love to talk.

Get in touch →See the work