Open to work

Hey, I'm Harsha

an Interaction Designer building products that actually ship.

Identifying the real break, not the surface bug.

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My Work
Meet Me

About

I don't just design screens. I design decisions.

Harsha in St. Louis
//HIRE ME

↑ that guy right there

I'm an Interaction Designer based in Reno, Nevada. Recent MS in Information Systems from Saint Louis University. Open to relocate.

My path went from co-founding a design studio in India (10+ shipped products across 4 verticals), through graduate systems work at SLU, to interaction design at Community Dreams Foundation. Across all of it, the pattern was the same: find where the experience actually breaks, define the problem clearly, design a solution, ship it, keep going.

Right now I'm the sole design owner on Phoenix AI, a live AI-powered health platform with direct ship authority to production. Alongside that, I publish interaction craft essays in Design Bootcamp and ship self-initiated product work: Resume Tailor, LifeOS, and the Missing State case study.

Design doesn't ship perfect. It ships, gets used, reveals what's wrong, and improves.

Ask my portfolio

Or just ask.

This site is trained on every project, every role, and every design decision I could remember. Ask it anything.

Or try one of these:

Case Studies

Making hidden friction visible.

Real shipped work first. Concepts second. Every card built to read without a click.

Phoenix AI
Phoenix AI

Six decisions in two weeks. Every ticket said 'your call.'

Sole design owner on a live AI health platform. Direct ship authority to production. No PMs. No approval gates. Six documented reframes — from a badge request that became an IA overhaul, to a layout bug that looked like a state bug. Live at phoenix-cdreams.org.

BuiltinTech Client Delivery System
BuiltinTech

10+ client products, 4 verticals, one delivery pattern.

Cofounded BuiltinTech in 2023. Drove 80% of client acquisition. Built a repeatable intake to ship pipeline across construction, minerals, fitness, and infrastructure clients.

NRI Wellbeing Services
NRI Wellbeing

Services above the fold. Company story below.

ISO certified services company with 10+ categories. First time visitors needed to find the right service in 30 seconds without reading company history first. Live at nriwellbeing.com since 2022.

Starbucks Mobile Order Redesign
Starbucks

One reusable state card, four downstream surfaces.

The wait was not the real problem. The anxiety came from not knowing whether the drink was queued, being made, ready, or forgotten. A single reusable state card absorbed all four surfaces. CEO independently named mobile pickup a priority in the Oct 2024 earnings call.

SLU Alumni Connect
SLU Alumni Connect

Four user roles, one platform, no confusion.

Students, alumni, mentors, and admins needed different answers from the same system. The design challenge was clarity by role. FERPA compliant scope, role based dashboards.

Resume Tailor
Resume Tailor

A tool for people who write their own resumes.

AI resume tools lose credibility when they over flatter or fabricate. This product makes the gap visible before it rewrites anything. Honest scoring, real ATS checks, files never leave the browser.

harshaasapu.com
harshaasapu.com

A portfolio treated as a product, not a static page.

Recruiters scan fast. The site has to prove role, judgment, shipped work, and credibility before asking anyone to dig deeper. Grounded RAG assistant, restrained motion, shipped proof.

LifeOS
LifeOS

One dashboard scales 1 to 30 habits, no UI re architecture.

Most tools punish people when plans break. LifeOS assumes the week will change and turns that gap into feedback instead of failure. The interaction pattern absorbs volume without new components.

Motion

Motion Design

Short-form motion pieces, type, brand, and concept work where timing earns its place.

Explore all motion work
01 / 03

Ted Drewes Frozen Custard · 2025

Ted Drewes — Concrete in Motion

A short-form motion piece celebrating St. Louis' summer ritual — the upside-down concrete.

Motion DesignBrandAfter Effects

EXPERIENCE

Professional Experience

From healthcare product work at Phoenix AI to co-founding a startup, client delivery, and production websites — a timeline of real work, shipped systems, and hands-on UX practice.

Current role
Previous role

UI/UX Designer

Phoenix AI · Community Dreams Foundation

Feb 2026 – Present

Remote, USA

Active
  • Sole design owner on Phoenix AI, a live AI-powered health platform (biomarker data, wearable signals, ML-driven health scores and longevity insights) with direct ship authority to production.
  • Two weeks in: shipped a full dashboard redesign, brand cohesion overhaul, and cross-platform navigation consolidation, every ticket landed with either no spec or a one-line brief.
  • Built a named motion vocabulary tied to health metaphors (phoenixFadeUp, phoenixBreathe, phoenixDrawIn) all respect prefers-reduced-motion instead of adding generic hover decoration.
  • Reconciled two conflicting brand palettes (branding lead vs. engineering) into a single navy-anchored dark-mode token system in index.css, without escalation. Reconciliation is now the standard.
  • Design leadership across three healthcare products: Figma flows, prototypes, motion/interaction system, and async reviews through Slack. No PMs in the loop. No approval gates.

Co-Founder, UI/UX Designer

BuiltinTech

Jan 2023 – Dec 2023

India

  • Shipped 10+ consumer web products in 12 months across four verticals (construction, minerals, fitness, infrastructure) same designer, discovery through post-launch, no handoff friction.
  • 3–4 week ship cycles as the norm, not the exception. A repeatable intake → IA → design → build → deploy → handoff pattern replaced one-off custom work.
  • Translated ambiguous briefs into interaction models and reusable component libraries, second and third projects in the same vertical shipped faster than the first.
  • Drove 80% of new client acquisition through direct outreach and scoping before design work started; recruited and mentored 12 KL University interns on live client workflows.

UI Designer & Frontend Developer

Areksoft Technologies

Aug 2022 – Dec 2022

India

  • Designed and built responsive web interfaces in a production environment, gaining early exposure to how engineering teams turn requirements into working screens.
  • Worked with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, and Flask while learning how frontend decisions connect with backend request-response flows.
  • Supported brand and digital campaign work through Figma, Canva, and social asset design, giving me a stronger understanding of visual consistency beyond the product screen.
  • Learned how client requests, business expectations, feasibility, and delivery pressure shape the final user experience.

UI/UX Designer & Frontend Developer Intern

NRI Wellbeing Services

Jan 2022 – Jul 2022

India

  • Designed and shipped nriwellbeing.com end-to-end for an ISO-certified services company. Still in production 4+ years later. Zero redesigns needed, the IA decisions held.
  • Owned information architecture across 10+ service categories (property, healthcare, logistics, financial, NRI support services), with contact routing to the right team on each page.
  • Service-first homepage hierarchy: category cards in the customer's language above the fold, company story below. First-time visitors often family members finding services for parents in India could identify the right offering in under 30 seconds.
  • First zero-to-one production project. Confirmed that IA decisions made early determine whether a site needs redesigning every 18 months, or runs unchanged for years.

The Stack

How I Work

Research to reality no handoff gap.

Research feeds design. Design feeds build. Build feeds ship. Every step visible, every handoff owned.

Research & synthesis

Talk to users. Analyze data. Find the real problem, not the surface bug.

01
02

Prioritize with stakeholders

Align business and user needs. Decide what to build first and why.

Design & prototype

End to end flows. Then a functional prototype in code, not just Figma. Validate ideas fast.

03
04

Test & iterate

Validate with real users and stakeholders. Iterate until the solution is right.

Ship & measure

Dev collab or own the build. Track adoption, task completion, NPS delta. Close the loop.

05

Writing

Notes on design, mostly on Bootcamp.

All posts on Medium

Let's Talk

Let's ship something worth using.

Open to Product Design and UX roles. Also happy to talk freelance, collabs, or just design.

Reach me directly — I typically respond within 24 hours.

sriharshaasapu48@gmail.comEmail Me
HA

Harsha Asapu