Niran D.

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

I care about clarity, not just visual clarity but conceptual clarity: what's actually happening, and what someone should do next.

My craft sits between interaction design and system behavior. I'm drawn to ambiguous, 0-to-1 problems where the shape of the product isn't decided yet. I work closely with engineering and product, prototype early, design for the hard cases first, and keep the details holding up as things scale.

For the last four years that has meant designing on top of models: intent taxonomies, response structures, failure behavior, and the cost of a generation. The interesting problems in AI products aren't in the chat bubble. They're in deciding what the system does when it isn't sure, and making that legible to someone who has to act on it.

Experience

  • 2022–Present

    Product Designer

    KAYAK

    Design AI-native surfaces end to end (KAYAK.ai, AI Chat, and Search Overview) with a focus on response structure, intent handling, and cost-aware generation. Also own the partner tooling behind KAYAK's business travel marketplace: bulk placement operations and model-driven bid guidance.

  • 2021–2023

    MS, Human-Computer Interaction

    Indiana University

    Informatics Excellence Award. Started at KAYAK partway through the program and finished the degree while working.

  • 2020–2021

    Senior UX Designer

    HighRadius

    Designed an AI-driven autonomous receivables platform from 0 to 1 and built Trifecta, a unified design system that cut enterprise feature time to market by about 14 days.

  • 2018–2020

    UX Designer

    ivy (Entain)

    Led PartyPoker across Android, iOS, web, and desktop, onboarding 50,000 users in month one and driving a 20% engagement increase.

  • 2017–2018

    UI/UX Designer

    MAQ Software

    Designed responsive interfaces and interaction prototypes for data visualization and business intelligence products.

  • 2018

    UX Designer (Freelance)

    HelloFello

    Redesigned onboarding for 10+ early-stage startups, concurrent with MAQ Software. Took one client from roughly 100 to 5,000 signups a month.

  • 2015–2017

    UI Developer

    Tata Consultancy Services

    Built front-end experiences for TATA Docomo. Removed steps from registration and lifted form conversion from 11% to 35%.

My Toolkit