Case study · 2016 – 2018

Snowtint — first role with explicit ownership of UX outcomes.

Three different products in two years. Different users, different industries, same job: lead designer, end to end.

Period: Sep 2016 – Mar 2018
Role: Lead UX Designer
Tags: Founding UXTeam leadWebMobileMac

I joined Murali's team at Snowtint Pvt Ltd in Bangalore in 2017 as Lead UX Designer — my first role with explicit ownership of UX outcomes, not just artifacts. Snowtint was a young product studio, which meant I owned the full lifecycle: framing the problem with the founder, running the research, designing the flows, then handing off to engineering and watching it ship.

Across two years I worked on three very different products — a Mac digital-catalogue tool (iPress), a campus hiring marketplace (Campus Select), and a celebrity fitness app (JCVD with Jean-Claude Van Damme). Different users, different industries, same job: lead designer, end to end.

Role & scope

01Lead designer, end to end — from contextual inquiry through wireframes, hi-fi, and engineer handoff on three shipping products.
02Research-first — designed and ran qualitative studies, recruited participants, built behavioural personas, mental models, and journey maps before the first sketch.
03Stakeholder facilitation — running workshops with founders and client stakeholders to align product vision with user reality.
04Pattern-library contribution — building the studio's first internal pattern library so the next product didn't restart from zero.
05Hiring & team growth — interviewing and onboarding designers as Snowtint scaled.

Designing for e-commerce across omnichannel customer journeys has taught me to solve for complex systems outside just the digital space.

Selected projects

Three different products in two years — a Mac digital-catalogue tool, a campus hiring marketplace, a celebrity fitness app. Different users, different industries, same UX exercise: study the actual user, design from their job inwards, ship the simplest thing that works.

iPress for Macbook

Reimagining a digital-catalogue tool that field reps actually wanted to use.

Context

iPress was the studio's flagship — a Mac app that let field sales reps walk into a customer meeting and present a product catalogue without slides or PDFs. The previous version was a tool to be tolerated, not used.

UX angle

The previous version was designed around the catalogue's data model — products, categories, attributes. The actual user wasn't browsing; they were presenting, in front of a customer, with about ninety seconds to make the point. Designing for that moment is a different problem.

Approach

Spent time in customer meetings to see how reps actually used the tool. Re-designed around the moment of presenting — large media, fast switching, no fiddly chrome. The catalogue structure stayed underneath; the surface served the situation.

What I learned

Design for the situation, not just the user. Knowing the room a tool is used in changes the design more than knowing the persona who uses it.

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Campus Select

A two-sided marketplace connecting hiring companies and students on campus.

Context

Campus hiring in India was running on spreadsheets, WhatsApp groups, and on-campus drives that didn't scale. Companies wanted shortlists; students wanted offers; the campus office was the bottleneck.

UX angle

Two-sided products usually fail because they're designed as two products. The interesting UX work is in the shared spine — the data model, the lifecycle, the moments where one side's action becomes the other side's input.

Approach

Mapped the hiring cycle for all three sides (student, recruiter, campus office) before sketching. Designed the student app for high signal in short browsing windows, the recruiter side for shortlist quality, the campus dashboard as the system of record.

What I learned

In multi-sided products, design from the data model up, not from any one screen down. Otherwise you end up debugging the same UX problem in three places.

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JCVD · Train with Van Damme

A celebrity fitness app shipped on a tight launch window in partnership with Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Context

A short-fuse partnership project: design and ship a fitness app under Jean-Claude Van Damme's brand, App Store launch in select regions, no second chance to get it right.

UX angle

The user arriving at a celebrity fitness app probably isn't athletic — they're curious. So the on-ramp has to be generous, and the deeper workouts have to feel earned. Designing for the actual arrival mode, not the aspirational one, was most of the work.

Approach

Tight design loops — IA, content structure, workout flows, visual language all decided alongside brand stakeholders so product and brand could agree in the same room. No second-pass reconciliation later.

What I learned

On brand-led products, get the brand decisions and the product decisions in the same room. Settling them sequentially means redoing both.

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What this role taught me

LESSON 01
Lead is a verb, not a title.
Being 'Lead' of a one-person design team forced me to learn to lead through the work — clear writing, sharp specs, and engineers who wanted to build my designs because the brief was honest.
LESSON 02
You learn the most from the user you'd never have asked for.
The Mac field rep, the campus placement officer, the celebrity-brand manager — each pulled my mental model further from 'designer's defaults' than any course could.
LESSON 03
Patterns travel across products if you let them.
The interaction primitives I built for iPress quietly powered the next two products. That was the first time I felt the leverage of a design system, even before the term was on my radar.
LESSON 04
Ship is a feeling, not just an event.
A small studio ships every two weeks because it has to. That muscle — small, fast, real — is the one I still use most.