About
I am Akash Kumar, known online as akashshivanand. I am a product designer with around nine years of work, based in Gurugram, in the Delhi NCR region of India.
How I got here
I trained as a computer science engineer, but design found me. I started tinkering with it as a teenager, drawn to digital products that felt clean and easy to use. Because I came in through engineering, I speak both design and development, which is a big reason the work actually ships.
The range I work across
Consumer work at super app scale taught me momentum, how to organise dozens of services into one screen and keep people moving. National public sector work taught me inclusion, how to build for everyone, including old phones and low tech literacy, with reliability and trust. One teaches you to make an experience profitable. The other teaches you to make a system fair. I have spent years on each.
What I believe
Keep it simple, in design and in life. Simple is not the same as plain. Function and usability lead, but a simple interface can and should be beautiful. Most problems people call design problems are really business, inclusion, or trust problems wearing a design costume. AI is a tool, not a role. It works in the hands of someone who already knows the craft.
What I obsess over
The error state. Everyone designs the happy path. I care about what the screen says when something breaks on a slow connection, because that is the moment a user decides whether to trust the product or walk away. On a public service, a good error state is the difference between a citizen getting help and giving up.
Where I am headed
I want to move the default understanding of design from making things pretty to deciding how people live with technology. The gap between what design actually does and what people think it does has never been wider, especially at India's scale. That is the work.
Keep it simple. Find me on LinkedIn.