Product Designer

I design systems and experiences
that make complex decisions
feel simple

Most of my ideas start in real life — usually while creating experiences for the people around me.

Sociable

Plans that actually make it out of the group chat.

Sociable hero

Every friend group knows this moment:
"I'm down for whatever."

Which usually means one person ends up planning everything — figuring out what everyone is actually not down for.

What should take 10 minutes turns into hours of back-and-forth, jumping between Google Maps, Yelp, TikTok, and Instagram.

And somehow... you still don't have a plan.

UI Designer
Figma
Solo project

What makes group planning so hard?

Too many choices

Especially in cities, the options become overwhelming

The "vibe check" is real

Happy hour, dinner, drinks — it doesn't work for everyone

No one wants to take charge

So the same person ends up doing all the planning

Effort is uneven

The same person always ends up doing it

Group chat silence

No replies… until it's the wrong plan

Choice fatigue

Too many options with no clear way to narrow them down

"We talk about plans more than we actually make them." — Niki, 25

Interviews conducted

6

on group planning

Rely on one person to plan

83%

in their group chats

Switch apps per session

4+

during group planning

Said plans fall through

67%

due to no response in group chats

App

What it does well ✓

What it lacks ✗

Beli

Strong social recommendations

→ Not built for real-time group planning

Yelp

Huge database, reviews

→ Overwhelming and not collaborative

Google Maps

Navigation + discovery + AI search

→ No shared context or decision-making

These tools help you find places — but not decide together.

Competitor analysis

Apps per plan

3+

Decision making

10 min → 1+ hr

Plans for everyone

1 person

So I designed around this instead —

Make collaboration visible

Everyone should see what's happening — not just the planner.

Keep everything in one place

No switching between apps mid-plan.

Make participation easy

Tapping is faster than typing. Lower the barrier to reply.

Make planning feel fun

The process should feel just as enjoyable as the plan itself.

Putting pen to paper

Starting from scratch

Exploring how group planning could work. Ideas were loose, unstructured, and all over the place.

→ Needed to turn concepts into something usable

Sketches

V1

Exploring structure

First pass at the core screens — figuring out where things should live and how people move through them. It started to take shape, but felt heavy and disconnected.

→ Needed clearer structure and hierarchy

V1 Exploring structure

V2

Defining the system

The app started to feel like itself — but the flow still felt more like a form than a conversation. The experience was rigid where it needed to be flexible.

→ Needed to feel more flexible and social

V2 Defining the system

The final direction

Experience from "what should we do?" → to "see you there"

Brought everything together into a more cohesive experience — making planning feel faster, lighter, and more collaborative.

Final direction

What makes this work

Group planning hub

→ Everything lives in one shared space

Collaborative decisions

→ Vote, react, and move plans forward

Interactive feed

→ Discover spots your group will like

Calendar integration

→ Find a time that actually works

Extending the experience beyond the app

Planning doesn't end once a plan is created — it only works if everyone actually responds.

Most tools assume everyone will download the app.
In reality, people just want to click a link and move on.

So I designed a lightweight browser-based flow for friends
to quickly weigh in — no friction, no commitment.

Extending the experience

Turning responses into a plan

No more — "I'm down for whatever"

When the votes are in, the answer is obvious. No more chasing people up or re-reading a thread to figure out what everyone actually said.

Turning responses into a plan

Where this could go next

Real-time collaboration

Right now it's async — the next version should feel live, like everyone's in the room together.

Scaling across group sizes

A dinner for four is very different from a birthday weekend for twelve. The system needs to flex.

Availability + reservations

Once you've picked a spot, you shouldn't have to leave the app to book it.

Notifications help prevent plans from stalling

Plans die in silence. A well-timed nudge keeps things moving.

Designing Campaign Systems at Scale
Star Deals Week — Macy's

Reworking how high-volume promotions are structured, surfaced, and experienced on the homepage.

Star Deals Week hero

What this project needed to solve

Star Deals Week is one of Macy's most content-heavy campaigns — with multiple daily offers, changing promotions, and high visibility across the homepage.

The existing experience struggled to keep up. Content felt crowded, hard to scan, and difficult to navigate.

The goal was to create a system that could scale — without overwhelming the user.

Designer
Figma
2+ Designers

Where things were breaking down

→ Too many promotions competing for attention

→ Weak hierarchy made it hard to scan quickly

→ Vertical stacking created long, fatiguing scrolls

→ Users lacked clarity on when deals were relevant

→ Key CTAs were easy to miss within dense layouts

My role

I worked on the homepage campaign experience — figuring out how to make a page that changes daily, carries a huge amount of content, and needs to drive action actually feel manageable to shop.

I worked closely with content, marketing, and dev to make sure the patterns we landed on held up across the full campaign, not just a single moment.

Design approach

— Cut through the clutter — one clear thing at a time

— Make it obvious what matters most before anything else

— Design for someone giving it two seconds, not two minutes

— Build something that works whether there's one deal or twenty

— Stop burying the thing people actually need to click

The design

Evolving the system

System move 1

Condensed high-volume offers into scrollable systems

Instead of presenting everything at once, content was restructured into a more digestible format — users could quickly scan and engage without feeling overwhelmed.

→ Shoppers were scrolling past deals they actually wanted. This fixed that.

System move 2

Replacing long scrolls with structured slideshow modules

Vertical stacking was replaced with a slideshow-based approach, making it easier to browse multiple deals without excessive scrolling.

→ A more controlled, less fatiguing way to browse a lot of deals at once.

System move 3

Introduced temporal clarity through a calendar module

A calendar-based component helped users understand when deals were active — adding structure to an otherwise time-sensitive experience.

→ Star Deals runs for a week. People needed to know what was on today, not dig for it.

System move 4

Tested progressive disclosure for CTA clarity (A/B test)

Collaborated on a dropdown CTA variation to replace cluttered multi-CTA rows, preserving category access while reducing visible noise on mobile.

→ Fewer things on screen meant the one thing that mattered was easier to find.

System move 4

The final experience

Designed to feel clearer, more structured, and easier to navigate at scale.

Star Deals final experience

Key design decisions

→ Prioritizing hierarchy over volume

→ Structuring content into modular systems

→ Designing for scannability first

→ Balancing visibility with simplicity

Impact

— More structured and scannable homepage experience

— Reduced visual clutter across campaign modules

— Improved clarity around promotions and timing

Key learnings

— Designing for scale requires restraint, not more elements

— Clear hierarchy is critical in high-density experiences

— Systems thinking is more valuable than one-off solutions

If there were fewer constraints

Real-time collaboration

Right now it's async — the next version should feel live, like everyone's in the room together.

More flexible layouts

Adapt modules based on content volume instead of forcing one structure.

Smarter ordering

The most relevant deal shouldn't be buried under one that's irrelevant — ranking should respond to what's actually happening.

Less friction to test

Every pattern we shipped took time to get through design and dev. I'd want a way to test ideas faster, closer to real campaign conditions.

Scaling Promotional Templates Across Campaigns — Macy's

Designing a system that could flex across campaigns — without redesigning every time.

Promotional Templates hero

Designing for repeated use — not repeated effort

Promotional modules weren't built once — they were reused across multiple campaigns. From Black Friday to Valentine's to Clearance, each campaign introduced slight variations.

The challenge was building something flexible enough to flex, but structured enough to stay consistent.

Designer
Figma
Me + 2 designers

Where the system struggled

Templates varied across campaigns

No consistency from one campaign to the next

Reuse required manual adjustments

Every reuse meant starting a conversation about what needed to change

Layouts became dense under pressure

High-volume moments broke the visual structure we'd built

Hierarchy shifted by campaign

What was prominent one week disappeared the next

My role

I designed and refined the promotional templates — working within Macy's existing system, not around it. That meant every decision had to hold up across Black Friday, Valentine's Day, Easter, and everything in between.

Each campaign was essentially a live test of how well the templates were actually built.

Design approach

The goal wasn't to make a beautiful one-off layout — it was to build something the team could hand off, reuse, and trust. That meant designing for the edge cases, not just the ideal version.

Every pattern needed to work whether the headline was three words or twelve.

The design

Evolving the system

System move 1

One primary message. Everything else supports it.

The homepage shifted from dense, competing promotional blocks to a cleaner hero-led structure — one primary message first, with supporting offers organised more intentionally below.

→ A single focus point made it easier for shoppers to know where to start.

System move 2

Less on the page — but the page works harder.

The homepage evolved from crowded, box-heavy compositions into a cleaner modular system — larger imagery, fewer competing elements, and more intentional spacing.

→ Improved readability and reduced cognitive load in high-density layouts.

System move 3

The same template, different campaign, same structure.

Black Friday and Valentine's Day shouldn't feel like the same page — but they should share the same bones. Refined layouts to support both high-volume and more curated campaigns.

→ The same template could flex across different campaign needs without breaking structure.

System move 4

Each campaign taught us something the last one didn't.

Each campaign was a live test. What held up got kept. What broke got fixed — reducing visual clutter and spacing inconsistencies across templates over time.

→ Improved readability and reduced cognitive load in high-density layouts.

What this project taught me

Designing systems isn't just about structure — it's about how they hold up over time and repetition.

01

Reuse exposes friction faster than planning

02

Systems don't fail in theory — they fail at scale

03

Consistency reduces decision fatigue — for users and for teams

The final experience

The same page, every campaign — just smarter each time.

Same components less effort to build

Less effort to build more time to refine

More predictable for users more trust in the experience

Impact

— Consistent, scalable experience across campaigns

— Clearer promotional hierarchy across placements

— Reduced time spent rebuilding common patterns

Reflection

— The most durable work wasn't a layout — it was the logic behind it

— Real-world reuse exposed things planning never would

— A good system makes the next campaign easier, not the same

If there were fewer constraints

Dynamic templates by campaign type

Black Friday shouldn't behave like a normal week — the template should know the difference.

Clearer signposting for time-sensitive deals

When something expires today, that should feel urgent — not buried in the same layout as everything else.

Smarter content prioritisation

Surface what actually drives engagement instead of what's just newest.

Deeper personalisation layers

Make campaigns feel more relevant to the person seeing them, not just the campaign running.

I design systems, environments, and experiences that help people feel oriented, connected, and engaged

I'm Niharika — a systems-minded creative working at the intersection of brand, product, and experience design. I blend visual storytelling with real-world usability, balancing aesthetics with structure and creativity with scalability.

At Macy's I learned to think at scale — evolving legacy systems under business and technical constraints, building reusable modules that hold up across high-traffic surfaces, and iterating quickly while maintaining consistency. My personal work reveals another side: emotionally driven storytelling, hand-crafted visual identities, and experiences rooted in culture and human connection.

I think in worlds, not isolated assets. Whether it's a homepage system, a social planning app, or a party game, my instinct is to create cohesive experiences where every detail is intentional and everything scales.

Beyond the brief

Outside of work, I design personalised experiences for people — celebrations, storytelling, social interaction. My biggest personal project was designing the full visual identity for my own South Indian wedding: a cohesive multi-event suite blending traditional cultural motifs with modern editorial design. Every element was custom illustrated — invitations, logos, wardrobe guides, signage, and iconography — built around botanical greens, marigold tones, parchment neutrals, and culturally intentional details. The goal was building an immersive visual world, not just pretty stationery.

I also design highly customised social games and experiences for parties and group events — rooted in behavioural thinking and how to get people genuinely connected rather than just consuming passively.

Elevated but approachable. Clean without feeling cold. Modern with warmth. Editorial yet functional.

Skills

  • Product Design
  • UX / UI Design
  • Interaction Design
  • Design Systems
  • Prototyping

Tools & Technology

  • Figma / Figma AI
  • Adobe Creative Suite
  • After Effects
  • Adobe Firefly
  • Luma AI
  • AEM (Adobe Experience Manager)
  • Framer

Experience

Macy's Inc.

Designer Specialist

Evolved the homepage from promotion-heavy layouts into scalable, storytelling-driven systems using AEM templates — supporting +2% go-forward comparable sales growth. Built and iterated on modular homepage systems in Figma, solving for scalability, content density, and usability across high-volume campaign environments. Developed motion and AI-assisted visual assets using After Effects, Firefly, and Luma AI.

Aug 2022 – Present

Clinique

Freelance Graphic / Web Designer

Created motion and visual assets for homepage and campaigns, scaling content across web and marketing platforms. Designed video creatives using Adobe After Effects & Premiere Pro. Developed digital ads for third-party platforms while maintaining brand consistency.

Apr – Jun 2022

Sociable — Personal Project

Product Designer (Solo)

Designed a community-driven planning platform to reduce decision fatigue by consolidating group preferences, trusted inputs, and AI-driven recommendations. Led end-to-end design from concept to high-fidelity prototypes in Figma, including user flows and interaction patterns.

2023

Education

Parsons School of Design (The New School)

Bachelor of Fine Arts — Communication Design

2017 – 2021

Cornell University (E-Cornell)

User Experience Design Certification

2023

Let's make something worth noticing

Open to new opportunities, collaborations, and conversations. If you're working on something interesting, reach out.