amitgaikwad
About Me
UX Designer with 4 years of industry experience in UI design and front-end development and a keen eye on designing for emotion thoughtful interaction patterns, captivating aesthetics, rich user research and accessibility.
Education
University of Maryland
University of Mumbai
Work & Experience
Teaching Assistant - User-Centered Design
UMD School of Information
• Assisted Prof. Dennis Frezzo in planning, conducting, and supervising weekly in-class design activities and grading for 166 students. • Guided undergraduate students in learning and utilizing the UCD process while providing helpful and appropriate feedback to promote critical design thinking.
UX Researcher
UMD iConsultancy
• Assisted Prof. Wayne Phoel’s ongoing research with The Institute of System’s Research on financial literacy in American households. • Gathered rich qualitative data through contextual inquiry to enable problem discovery and performed data synthesis for actionable insights and critical recommendations with experience models like personas, sensation board, user journeys, and decision points which were shared with stakeholders. • Realigned client’s research strategy with gathered requirements and product concepts.
Usability and Accessibility Lead + Research Assistant
TRACE Research and Development Center
• Headed usability study of Prof. Gregg Vanderheiden’s Future of Interfaces website through user testing, heuristic and WCAG compliance validated through user feedback, regular reports, and documentation. • Led research for the FOI project on haptic feedback to supplement the compendium content.
UX/UI Designer + Front-end Developer
Ronin Labs
• Designed and developed responsive interfaces for a broad spectrum of mobile-first, responsive web applications. • Led user experience and visual design for 20+ fast-paced projects, boosting startup’s consumer engagement with 5M+ impressions and evangelizing UX process. • Created wireframes, high-fidelity mockups, rapid prototypes and conducted user testing while being the prime mediator that helped design and technical teams collaborate.
Co-founder + Creative Lead + UI Designer and Developer
• Designed a medical dashboard app in collaboration with a cross-functional team of software engineering and medical professionals using agile methodologies. • Led visual design, conceptualized user interface design, and executed development of front-end for app’s beta release.
