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.

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.

  1. 01

    Research before opinions

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

  2. 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.

  3. 03

    Design with the system, not around it

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

  4. 04

    Engineering is a co-author

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

  5. 05

    Test the riskiest assumption first

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

Where I’ve been

Six years, three continents.

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

  • Nov 2024 — PresentSelf-employed · Seattle, WA

    Independent Product Designer

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

  • Oct 2023 — Nov 2024CloudIQ 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.

  • Jul 2022 — Oct 2023CloudIQ 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.

  • May 2018 — May 2019WeTheDevelopers · Gujarat, India

    Junior UX Engineer

    Designed and implemented web and mobile apps for B2B clients. Lifted average DAU across partner brands by ~90% over the year.

Toolkit

The things in my backpack.

Design

  • Product design
  • UX/UI
  • Wireframing
  • Prototyping
  • Design systems
  • Visual design
  • IA

Research

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

Build

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

Tools

  • Figma
  • Adobe XD
  • Notion
  • Maze
  • Miro
  • Linear / Jira

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

Now booking · 2026

Got a hairy workflow? Let’s untangle it.

I’m exploring full-time product design roles and select advisory projects. If you’ve got a B2B product that’s grown into a maze, I’d love to hear about it.