Ishan Bhalla

Institute of Design, IIT Chicago

University of Mumbai

St Mary's, Pune

User Experience Designer

Zürich, Canton of Zürich, Switzerland

Google

Interaction Designer

Google (via Randstad)

Centralway Numbrs

Senior User Experience Designer

I worked on Yahoo mail which was once a market leader but has fallen behind the competition in recent years. Today a brilliant team is working hard to reinvent the product. Designing a product for over 100 million daily active users has taught me a lot about the craft of creating great products.One of the coolest things I worked on here was a rethinking of what email search should be. Based on the simple notion that when users search in their email, they are not looking for a list of emails but rather for some information in their mailbox. With the little information that the users put into the search box, how might we understand the intent behind the search and bubble up the most relevant information? The foundation we established for search is now slowly making it’s way into the product.I also redesigned the Compose and Reply experience for the October 2013 release of Yahoo mail.  The idea was to modernize, simplify and unify the compose and reply experience. Upon release, the design won appreciation in technology publications like TechCrunch and Verge.

Yahoo!

Experience Designer

- Worked on a new product innovation project in the analysis and early synthesis phases. Helped the team map out the user journey and define prototyping strategy.- Defined qualitative research protocol for studying the users’ in-store experience. - Studied the relationship between SC Johnson and its retail partners to identify opportunities for improving the user experience and presented findings to the RD&E executive committee.

SC Johnson

Design Intern

Illinois Institute of Technology

Research Assistant

- Designed interfaces for web, smart-phone, and television products.- Helped product teams move away from thinking about features and towards thinking about personas, scenarios of use and task flows.- Played a key role in translating between design and development teams because of my previous experience in software development and project management.- Conducted ethnographic studies around home entertainment, home appliance usage, and smart-phone application discovery.- Created Information Architecture, task flows, wireframes etc. as design deliverables.

Infosys

User Interface Lead

Senior User Interface Designer

- Led a team of 7 engineers developing applications to improve productivity of Boeing design teams.- Started a practice of rapid prototyping to accelerate requirement gathering.- Introduced software design practices that saved over 3000 man hours of effort in 2 years.- Helped build a culture of knowledge sharing in a team of 100 engineers.

Software Engineer and Team Lead