Nice to meet you
Hi there,
I'm Aonnoy Sengupta
I work as a user interface & user experience designer, and this is what I do in a nutshell:
1. Design beautiful & thoughtful interfaces.
2. Listening to users & fighting confusion in all forms.
3. Love collaborating with other teams and working in an agile environment.
4. Dive deep into the core values of businesses & startups and help them achieve their goals.
Background Story
The early days
Born in the early 90's in the capital city of Bangladesh, I was a young boy who had dreams of being many things- a pilot, a scientist, an engineer, a plumber (and what have you). But never did i think that i would become a designer, despite my natural curiosity towards the subject.
As a child I was extremely fortunate to have travelled the world and have an amazing childhood. Growing up in Singapore, spending my teen years in India, i had the opportunity to meet, grow and socialise with people from different cultures and ethnicity and learn so much about life. Despite growing up in a rich diverse environment, I went to design-deprived schools where I was always told that studying in computers and being an engineer is the ultimate goal to reach. This would lead to a optimal life and this was often subject to a respectable profession. So I listened, and decided to pursue a career on it. Whilst i maintained the status quo of an upstanding student, naturally i pursued creative hobbies. This included the fun activity of wrecking the blank canvas on Photoshop with cool graffiti and designing logos.
That was the first of many turning points in my life, designing logos for small local shops for a bit of pocket money (I indeed was a bit of a hustler). At the age of 15 my dad wanted me to work for his company in his design team. That was the start of my journey into the designing world. The training was overwhelming and working alongside with talented & experienced designers allowed me to share their excitement in creating and developing something we made, and sharing it to the world.
I will never forget the feeling.
I worked there under an internship as a branding designer for three years before my education took priority. Despite this pause along the journey, this was a serious pivotal moment that would later have an unexpected positive impact in my later years. Sure enough, after leaving the internship, my vision and passion were finally set in stone. I became a freelance designer.
Summary
Following my passion
Flash forward to the year 2014, I came to a beautiful island city south of England, called Portsmouth, to pursue my bachelors degree in Computer Science and graduated in 2017.
Throughout my student years, I continued my freelance design career alongside my university as I had to support myself financially.
My growth as a designer allowed me to expand my skill set from branding to designing interfaces for mobile and the web. Eventually, I completely slipped into the world of UX, as studying in computer science enabled me to embrace the technicalities in implementing a product.
As the projects I worked on grew more complex I became more curious to learn new things. This followed me into my collaboration with other creatives, learning how to effectively communicate my ideas with the team. This resulted in delivering modern and successful solutions for my clients.
"I believe in working hard and smart instead of searching for hacks and shortcuts”
Why design
Making people happy by making things simple
Here are few of the reasons why I love being a user experience designer:
1. I get to see the results of what I do: Seeing my design used by the end-users during usability test is very rewarding. Knowing that it’s being used by millions of users makes it even more exciting.
2. Multi-faceted problem-solving activity that’s never boring. We have the art of asking questions in user research, get creative with the user interface, apply scientific method to rigorously test our hypothesis on the user’s problem, their habits etc. . The cool thing is all those things come together in systematic way so you can repeat the process in your next project.
3. I enjoy connecting dots. The dots that I connect are the different behaviours of the end-users and the factors that affect them as they interact with the product/system/other entities with also its own behaviours and factors. Combined together they create the system. Figuring out (or designing) how it all works together and then optimising it is a fun challenge.
4. Humans are fascinating. Observing and influencing what, why , where, when and how they do a certain behaviour are amazingly interesting. It becomes a super exciting task on trying to figure out how to apply it to your designs.
5. I like helping people. Making a product usable and fun to use is my way of helping others meet their need.