Hey, there! I’m Anju and this is my portfolio. I love design. I am passionate about creating unique, elegant interfaces and kind of obsess about the details ( but in a good way, I promise). I like to experiment with different trends and am currently going through a “clean and minimalist design” phase!

What’s my current role: Product Manager

Where: Microsoft

What I actually do: I work as a UX PM on the Windows Engineering systems team. We are responsible for Quality built in, and own web experiences for customers performing backend for Windows builds. My primary goals have been to align workflows to a more customer oriented approach driven by user experience principles. By introducing new user focused functionality into the engineering systems site, we have bought incremental change and positive impact on critical business metrics.

A typical project involves:

• customer visits
• collecting data and prioritizing problems
• brainstorming solutions
• designing (storyboards, wireframes,  journey maps, interactive prototypes etc.)
• iterate through feedback
• work closely with developers through implementation

Some notable achievements:

• Bringing improvements to our design review process by introducing a maturity model and setting expectations for each stage of maturity. This helped streamline our design thinking and get important feedback early on. You can find my model here.
• Creating a unified dashboard homepage experience for customers that is easily scanable and customizable.
• Authoring compelling and cohesive stories for our features that clearly highlight stakeholder and customer benefits.
• Conducting comprehensive customer interviews in order to fully understand user personas and their lifecycle with the product.
• Becoming an Intern buddy/mentor through the Microsoft Elevate program.

Previous: I’m currently working as an UX Design intern at Supplyframe,Inc. Its been an exciting summer internship, and I learnt a lot from the very talented folks there! I worked mainly on hackaday.io, their Open Hardware Projects website. The first couple of weeks,  I did a variety of design work such as:

• Creating a whole range of personalized emoticons for the website chat feature.
• Designing default project images for user projects.
• Designing posters and banners for advertising and branding Hackaday and their Hackaday Prize event.

I also got to redesign and develop their on-boarding feature page, where new users get to select interested topics and get recommended projects and people to follow. This was very interesting to work on, because the challenge was in getting the user to complete the process without opting to just skip it.

I obtained first hand experience in the entire process of starting with wireframes, creating mockups, interactive prototypes and finally developing the approved designs. It was a great learning experience – I created the designs mostly in Sketch(I cannot stop raving about how versatile and user friendly Sketch is!), with some of the elements created on Photoshop and Affinity Designer. Development was mostly HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript – I dabbled a little with Angular JS, and I’m so glad I did (its amazing what you can achieve with just a few lines of Angular code! ).

I’m almost through with my internship, and am returning to my final quarter at UCI in a few weeks. Its been a fun and educational summer, now its time to return to grad school and focus on graduating!