Hi, I'm Niran Designer / Engineer / Photographer

I'm an interaction designer and engineer with cross-industry experience building multi-surface interfaces.

Open to senior and staff product design roles.

Selected Work

AI Chat in the funnel KAYAK · Conversational search Shipped · 2025–26

Moving KAYAK's AI into the booking funnel. KAYAK's standalone AI site drew traffic but almost no return visits, so I rebuilt it as chat inside the booking flow and tested it with a single-input experiment that lifted booking revenue 14%. Live on kayak.com.

AI search overview KAYAK · Conversational search Shipped · 2025

Turning AI summaries into booking decisions. Flight results with hundreds of options and no opinion about any of them. I designed an AI overview that routes travelers to the filters that convert, gated by a scoring layer so it only generates on the searches worth paying for.

KAYAK.ai KAYAK · 0-to-1 AI product Shipped · 2024–25

The AI assistant that reframed how KAYAK thinks about search. Zero to one on a four-person team. I defined the model that turns a plain-language prompt into a real structured search, and the component system that let a later rebrand ship as a settings change.

About

I turn ambiguous, complex problems into products that are clear to use and hold up at scale.

I care about clarity, and not only the visual kind. What is the system actually doing, and what should someone do next? My work sits between interaction design and how a system behaves. I tend toward problems where the shape of the product is not decided yet, and I start with the hard cases, because the easy ones usually sort themselves out once the difficult ones do.

Lately that has mostly meant designing around AI models. The interesting problems are not in the chat bubble. They are in what the system does when it is unsure, and in how a person reviews its work before trusting it.

My Toolkit

Experience

Resume (PDF)

Product Designer KAYAK

Jul 2022–Present Boston · Hybrid

Lead designer on KAYAK's AI work for business travel. Took a booking flow that ran as a fixed sequence of screens and made it respond to what a traveler is actually asking for.
Defined the behavior spec and response structure for KAYAK's AI chat, and pushed for a minimal experiment before the full build. That test returned +14% booking revenue.
Worked with the machine learning team on a dashboard that lets travel brands see what a pricing decision would likely do to their results before they commit to it.
Removed a manual approval queue that sat between partners and changes to their own campaigns, giving back 1.29 days per request across roughly 1,500 requests a year.
Designed bulk editing so a partner can set up 500 ad placements in one pass, against the 1M+ route and placement combinations the system resolves per request.
Designed internal A/B testing tools so product managers and engineers could read their own experiment results without filing a request with the data team.

MS, Human-Computer Interaction Indiana University

Aug 2021–Mar 2023 Bloomington, IN

A two-year master's in Human-Computer Interaction, focused on interaction design and user research.
Graduated with the Informatics Excellence Award.
Started at KAYAK partway through the program and finished the degree while working.

Senior UX Designer HighRadius

Jun 2020–Jul 2021 Hyderabad · Remote

Led design on a platform that helps finance teams collect money their company is owed, pulling scattered account, payment and dispute records into one prioritized list of who to call today.
Contributed to the Trifecta brand rollout, starting with the competitive audit across enterprise fintech that set the visual direction.
Rebuilt the invoicing and collections dashboards around the actions the system was recommending, so an analyst could act on a suggestion without leaving the list they were working through.
Designed the screen for invoices that fail to process automatically, where the amounts do not match and someone has to reconcile them by hand.

UX Designer ivy (Entain)

Oct 2018–Jun 2020 Hyderabad

Sole designer on PartyPoker across web, mobile and desktop, reaching 50,000 users in the first month with a 20% lift in engagement.
Built a component library that several of the company's brands shared, so each could keep its own look without anyone redesigning the same screens twice.

UX Designer, Freelance HelloFello Studio

Mar 2018–Jul 2018 Remote

Sole designer for 10+ early-stage startups, reworking how a new user gets from signing up to actually using the product. One client went from roughly 100 to 5,000 signups a month. Freelance, alongside the MAQ Software role.

UX Designer MAQ Software

Aug 2017–Sep 2018 Hyderabad

Reworked 100+ data-heavy dashboards for Microsoft, Starbucks and PepsiCo through design audits and steady iteration, for a 15% rise in user satisfaction measured on standard scales (CSAT and SUS).
Ran boot camps and workshops that trained 60+ new hires on the design guidelines.