I failed my first usability test in Bangalore and it had nothing to do with the interface.
It was 2013. I had just finished my diploma and landed a freelance project, a basic inventory app for a textile wholesaler. I showed up with clean screens, logical flows, the kind of work that impresses a portfolio review panel. The owner, a middle-aged man in a dimly lit Chickpet office, opened the app on his Samsung Galaxy Y. He squinted at the screen for maybe three seconds. Then he handed the phone to his teenage son and said, "Tell me what this boy has made."
I had designed everything in English. His son translated every label into Kannada, live, while I sat there pretending my "intuitive" interface wasn't completely useless to the actual user.
That was my introduction to what it means to be a **product designer** serving **India**. Nobody teaches you this in a Bangalore classroom. They teach you grids and color theory and Figma. They don't teach you that your user might be a 55-year-old dealer in rural Maharashtra running your enterprise app on a phone with 512MB of RAM and a 3G connection that drops out every time a truck passes by.
I learned that lesson properly at Valmont, where I led UX for five enterprise apps used across 40 countries. All built for Western users first, then awkwardly shipped to Indian dealers. My job was to consolidate them into one platform. I built a design system with 60-plus components. I cut design-to-dev handoff time by 40 percent. Our dealers didn't care about any of that. What they noticed was the app crashing when a field officer tried to upload a photo of a broken irrigation pivot. What they noticed was error messages run through Google Translate.
So I stopped designing for my portfolio and started designing for that dealer.
What Being a Senior Product Designer in India Actually Means
There is a strange tension in being a **senior product designer** from **India** working out of Dubai. People hear "Dubai" and picture fintech dashboards for oil money. The reality is less glamorous. My mornings start at 6 AM Gulf time to catch the India team before lunch. My evenings stretch late for design reviews with European stakeholders. I have become fluent in time zone arithmetic, subtracting 1.5 hours for India, adding 3 for Europe, praying nobody schedules a meeting at 2 AM.
When I graduated in Bangalore, "UX designer" was barely a job title. Companies wanted web designers who could use Photoshop and maybe write HTML. Now LinkedIn is flooded with product designers from India, portfolios polished, Figma skills probably sharper than mine.
What hasn't changed is the gap between how we present our work and how it lands with Indian users.
I see portfolios full of dark mode dashboards and glassmorphism effects, the visual language that wins Dribbble likes. Then I think about the Indian user opening that interface on a cracked screen under direct sunlight at a bus stop. Contrast ratios wrong. Touch targets too small. Data loads too heavy for the network. Nobody briefed the designer on real conditions. Nobody said, "This will be used outdoors, by someone wearing reading glasses bought from a street vendor."
At Valmont, I started testing on the worst device I could find, an old Android phone from a drawer. If it worked on that, it had a chance in the field. If it didn't, I stripped things down. No animations. No unnecessary calls. Text readable with brightness maxed because the user was standing in a wheat field at noon. This isn't portfolio work. It's what keeps a business running.
My freelance work taught me the same lessons. I built FinFlow, a savings app. I rebuilt the Voyacher travel platform. These projects let me code, which I genuinely enjoy. HTML, CSS, TypeScript, React, Next.js. I use AI tools now, Claude, Cursor, n8n. None of them solve the fundamental problem: understanding the person on the other end of the screen.
Indian users are not a monolith. I have designed for English-speaking founders in Bangalore and for Hindi-speaking agricultural dealers in Uttar Pradesh. For users who read Arabic, which I can do haltingly. For users who speak Malayalam, my native language. For users who switch between three languages mid-conversation. The app handles this gracefully or it fails.
Supporting a language is not just translating strings. A Kannada label might be 40 percent longer than English, breaking your carefully laid out form. Concepts like "depreciation schedule" don't have clean translations. You design around the explanation, not the word.
I moved to Dubai years ago. It's a good base. The work is steady, the exposure real. But India never leaves your design brain once it's been shaped there. I still think about low bandwidth, older devices, users who might not read the language my interface defaults to.
Sometimes I meet designers here who have only designed for users like themselves: English speaking, high speed internet, latest iPhone. I don't envy them. Designing for constraints makes you better. Designing for India makes you honest because the users won't pretend to be impressed. They'll close your app and find one that works. Or they'll call their nephew who "knows computers." Or they'll go back to their paper ledger that has worked fine for twenty years.
That last one still haunts me. The paper ledger. The ultimate competitor. If your app cannot beat the simplicity of a notebook, it doesn't matter how pretty the UI is.
Eleven years in. Sixty-plus component design system. Products in 40 countries. Eight-plus freelance clients across fintech, travel, logistics. I write code. I use AI tools daily. I still sit down with every new project and ask: who is actually going to use this, and what does their real day look like?
Not their persona document. Not the user journey map. Their actual day. The commute. The network quality. The device in their pocket. The language they think in.
That question started in a textile office in Chickpet. I have been asking it ever since.