Ankur Sinha — Principal UX Designer, Human–AI Interaction
03 — PHILOSOPHY
Four principles I keep returning to.
Not a manifesto, not a thesis. Four operating principles that decide what I build, how I ship it, and what I refuse to compromise on.
- 01
The seam is the design.
The moment of decision, override, and trust — where a human meets an AI agent — that's the surface I work on. Not the model, not the wrapper. The seam.
Applied in · Helm · Sentinel · Recourse · Unhosted
- 02
Uncertainty must be legible.
An AI's claim is only trustworthy if you can read how sure it is — and the basis must be checkable. Confidence without calibration is a lie with a UI on top.
Applied in · Helm's approval gate · Sentinel's diff view
- 03
Reversibility is the policy axis.
Not "safety" — that's a category, not a control. The right question is: can the human undo what the agent just did, within how many seconds? That's the real surface area.
Applied in · Helm's reversibility chip · Recourse's audit trail
- 04
Prototypes are the argument.
I write my own code because a prototype is the only design document that can't be ignored. Ship the argument, then defend it in production.
Applied in · Every Lab project · every case study
04 — EXPERIENCE
12+ years, four companies, one through-line.
Engineer-turned-designer. Shipping enterprise SaaS and AI-assisted product surfaces across banking, supply chain, oil & gas, e-commerce, and cloud database tooling.
Currently
Feb 2020 – Present
5+ years
Oracle
Principal UX Designer · Cloud Database Tooling & AI Orchestration
Lead designer for cloud database tooling and AI orchestration surfaces. Cross-tool consistency across the data lifecycle. Specifics under NDA.
- Enterprise
- Data tooling
- AI orchestration
Apr 2018 – Feb 2020
2 years
Deloitte
UX Designer / Product Strategist · Touche Tohmatsu India
Brought UCD process to enterprise channels — Salesforce, Supply Chain ERPs. Owned end-to-end user research, information architecture, and reporting surfaces with product, engineering, QA, and clients.
- Service design
- Enterprise
- Salesforce
Sep 2016 – Mar 2018
1.5 years
Snowtint
Lead UX Designer · Snowtint Technologies
Founded and led the company's first UX team. Built a group of interaction designers and researchers; owned production across web, social, and mobile; set strategic UX direction.
- Founding UX
- Team lead
- Web
- Mobile
Jun 2015 – Jul 2016
1 year
Rage
UX Designer · Rage Communication
Banking and consumer projects: Citibank (NA / India / Philippines), HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Vodafone, Unilever, CEAT, Quikr. Wireframes, interaction design, end-user interviews, client presentation.
- Banking
- Consumer
- Client work
Jun 2013 – Jul 2014
Before that ·
IBM India · IT Analyst.
Where the engineer-turned-designer story starts. Built systems before I designed them — and that's still how I think.
05 — THE LAB
What I build when nobody's asking.
Side projects I code in evenings + weekends. Each is the design argument shipped as working software.
Supporting open-source
3
WatchTower
Self-hosted deployment platform
Operator-facing tooling for container auto-updates, multi-node deployment, and guided host operations across your own machines. One operator can see live status across six interconnected tools and recover any of them.
· Ships across 6 distribution channels
- Python
- Electron
- VS Code
- PyPI
GovLens
Context-aware overlay for government portals
Chrome extension that activates on 25+ national gov TLDs. Translation, structural navigation, a 0–100 usability score, and a region-aware jargon explainer. A three-engine translation cascade tells you which engine will answer before you click.
· 25+ TLDs · 100+ languages
- Chrome ext
- On-device AI
- Claude SDK
EMPATHEIA
Multi-modal AI companion, offline-first
Next.js + AI SDK PWA. Camera-based facial-expression detection feeds mood-aware tone adaptation. Hybrid fallback: if the model runtime fails, deterministic sentiment + keyword heuristics keep the empathy map updating — the user never sees a dead surface.
· PWA · graceful degradation
- Next.js
- AI SDK
- face-api.js
- Ollama
06 — USABILITY
Usability is the litmus test, not the checklist.
Accessibility, calibrated confidence, and recoverability aren't accessories — they're how you tell if enterprise software is actually any good. The full practitioner's guide lives at /usability.
Foundation
HFI Certified Usability Analyst
CUA · Human Factors International
B.Tech · Computer Science
BTLIT Bangalore · VTU · 2008–2013
12+ years shipping product
Enterprise SaaS · AI surfaces · Native + Web
In the guide
- 01
What usability actually means (and what it doesn't)
- 02
The eight axes I score on
- 03
How calibrated confidence beats raw percentages
- 04
When to escalate to a human reviewer
07 — STACK
The toolbox.
What I reach for, by job. The tools are interchangeable; the principles (above, in 03) are not.
- Frontend
Where most of the prototyping happens.
- React 19
- TypeScript
- Next.js
- Tailwind v4
- Framer Motion
- Three.js
- Native
When the surface needs to feel native.
- SwiftUI
- Jetpack Compose
- Tauri
- Electron
- Languages
What I write directly — not via Copilot.
- TypeScript
- Python
- Rust
- Go
- Swift
- Kotlin
- AI & runtime
Where the agent-side of the interface lives.
- Claude
- Anthropic SDK
- MCP
- llama.cpp
- Ollama
- On-device AI
- Design
Specs and tokens, when the prototype isn't enough.
- Figma
- FigJam
- Storybook
- Token Studio