Deepali Karanjavkar
AI-native UX/UI product designer
01 / 06  · 
Scroll
Designed and developed by Deepali Karanjavkar  ·  © 2026 All rights reserved
01
  • AI-native UX/UI product designer
  • Milton Keynes and London, UK
02
  • Ten years, startups to enterprise
  • M.Des HCI, IIT Bombay
  • Distinction, King’s College London
03
  • Sky Buddy · concept, 2025
  • Hybrid Keyboard™ · shipped, 2015
  • HabitHero · concept to MVP, 2024
04
  • Aurora Inspiration
  • The lost conversations
  • The Diya platform
05
  • Evidence before opinion
  • Everyone included
  • Systems, not screens
  • Test at the cheapest fidelity
06
  • deee.idc@gmail.com
  • +44 (0)7903 885992
  • Full working rights in the UK, no sponsorship required
01 / 06
Deepali Karanjavkar

Deepali Karanjavkar

I'm an AI-native UX/UI product designer in Milton Keynes and London. For ten years I've designed for people who get left out. Someone typing their own language for the first time, someone who can't hold a remote. I start with them, and I use AI to get there faster.

I trained as a visual artist at Sir J.J., then took a masters in human-computer interaction at IIT Bombay, and I've just finished a postgraduate year in UX/UI product design at King's College London with a distinction.

In between came the decade that actually taught me the job. I was the first designer at Indus OS, building a phone for the ninety per cent of India that doesn't read English. The keyboard we made ended up on more than a hundred million phones.

I'm in the UK now, working on voice, mobile and AI products. The habit hasn't changed: go and watch people, then design what they actually need.

Running workshops sharpens how I design.

When I'm not designing digital products, I run hands-on design and making workshops for children, parents and teachers. Over the years, that has grown into more than sixty in-person sessions and a free library of tutorials online.

Workshops are a very direct test of whether something is clear. If an instruction is confusing, people hesitate, skip steps or need help. So I structure each session carefully. I focus on one idea, break it into simple steps, watch where people get stuck, and improve that part for the next time.

I bring the same thinking into product design. Clear flows, simple instructions and useful feedback often matter more than adding more features.

diyadesignacademy.com →

10+ years

designing products

100M+ people

using something I designed

3.5M+ people

taught

02 / 06

Experience & education

A decade that runs from startup founding teams in Mumbai to independent practice in the UK. The through-line is complex products that have to survive contact with millions of real people.

Where I've worked.

2025 →

Lead Product Designer & Founder

Diya Design Ltd., UK

My own studio, designing digital education. I build the learning frameworks, test them with real user groups, and use AI in the workflow, which has cut our design sprints by about a third.

2019–2025

Senior UX / Product Design Consultant

Independent · India & UK

Brought in by enterprise clients across regions. Running discovery workshops with executives, engineers and users, then taking it all the way to flows, wireframes and interface strategy their teams could build.

2016–2019

Lead Product Designer

Digital Nirvana, for AlphaStreet Inc.

A US financial-services product, dense with data. My job was making it readable, and building one design system that held together across web, iOS and Android.

2014–2016

Founding UX-UI Designer

Indus OS, Mumbai

Designer number one on India's first regional-language phone OS. Research, the design language, the core apps, the keyboard, the app store. I hired and led the team as we grew ten times in a year. Samsung took the ecosystem; PhonePe later took the platform.

2013–2014

UX Designer → Senior UX Designer

Samsung Electronics, Mumbai

Interactions for consumer mobile products, presented to stakeholders at Samsung headquarters in Suwon.

2012–2013

User Experience Designer

Moonraft Innovation Labs (now UST)

Where I started. Fast wireframing and interface design for banking and commercial clients.

Where I studied.

2024–2025

King's College London

UX/UI Product Design, Level 7 · Distinction, 80%
2010–2012

IIT Bombay · IDC School of Design

M.Des., Human-Computer Interaction · 8.87/10
2005–2009

Sir J.J. Institute of Applied Art

B.F.A., Applied Art and Visual Design · Grade A
03 / 06

Featured case studies.

Each case study shows work I led & created end to end as a UX/UI product designer, from the first problem to the final design. Choose a project to see the thinking behind the work.

04 / 06

AI experiments.

Side work and side projects. I'm less interested in using AI to draw screens faster, and more interested in what these tools should feel like to live with.

Side work, 2026
for the founder of Aurora

Aurora Inspiration

Recent side work for the founder of Aurora, alongside my client projects. Everyone builds a feed. But a feed still makes you browse, compare, decide and arrange it all yourself. So I designed the opposite: you land in a city, and three good ideas are already waiting, each one explaining why it suits you. Then it books them. I wrote the concept and the rules it had to follow, then had Claude build the working prototype.

Open the presentation →

Published case study
April 2025

The lost conversations

I use ChatGPT for almost everything, and I could never find anything again. A hundred notebooks with blank covers. So I turned the frustration into a small study: three tasks, four questions, a few people sharing their screens with me. Five problems came out of it, and six fixes: pin a chat, rename it, tag it, file it, star an answer, search that actually works.

Read it on Medium →

In build

The Diya platform

A learning platform built around a loop that leaves the screen: find an idea, understand it, go and make it with your hands, come back and show what you made. It counts how many people actually made something, not how long they stared at it. AI helps with feedback; a person checks it before it reaches a child.

diyadesignacademy.com →

05 / 06

How I work.

Four habits run through everything here. I don't open Figma until I know what the research says, and I test at the cheapest fidelity that answers the question.

01

Evidence before opinion

I design from what I've watched and measured, not from what I reckon. Grass-roots studies with first-time, low-digital-literacy users at Indus OS. Nine participants for the Sky Buddy voice work. I test at the lowest fidelity that answers the question, then iterate.

02

Everyone included

My whole career has been designing for people who get excluded by default: non-English readers, first-time smartphone owners, people without an email address or a bank card, voices assistants mishear. I work to WCAG 2.1 and treat accessibility as a constraint I design inside, not a review at the end.

03

Designing together

I plan and run discovery workshops and co-design sessions with executives, engineers and users. I design in the open, and I give and take direct critique. At Indus OS I started as the first designer and ended up building and running the team.

04

Systems, not screens

One decision should hold across twenty-two language scripts or five devices. I've built unified design systems spanning web, iOS and Android. Components other designers and developers reuse, kept consistent across every script at Indus OS and across dense financial dashboards at AlphaStreet.

06 / 06

Let's talk.

I'd like to work on services that have to work for everyone who depends on them. If that's what you're building, I'd love to hear about it.

Looking for a full-time, permanent role. Full working rights in the UK, no sponsorship required, no visa restrictions.

Deepali Karanjavkar

AI-native UX/UI product designer, Milton Keynes and London. Six sides of the practice. Pick one.