Ambika Ramesh Menon
UX Designer and Researcher
Experience
Mixed-Methods UX Researcher
Google · Google Beam (Contract via Magnit)
· Established and led a rolling research program across pre-launch Google Beam hardware and software features, working directly with designers and engineers to turn behavioral signals into interaction decisions across presentation, calling, and network-degradation experiences. Findings helped teams determine what was ready to move forward, what needed iteration, and what required further validation as Beam expanded testing across 100+ enterprise partners.
· Built Beam’s first cross-functional UX metrics repository for design system components, creating a shared measurement framework that gave teams a consistent way to evaluate experience quality across studies rather than redefining success feature by feature.
Oct 2025 — Apr 2026
UX Designer and Researcher
Building H
· Led research and product concept development with Building H around a different premise for mobility: what if routing optimized for the value of people's time, rather than speed alone? Translated expert interviews and co-design research into concepts that used calendar, health, and travel context to help people prepare, recover, and connect during everyday trips.
· The research became the foundation for an interactive product vision exploring future mobility experiences for 2035–2040, taking the work from early research through product strategy and prototyping. The project went on to receive two UW HCDE Capstone awards, including Best Technical Leadership and Strategy.
Jan 2026 — Jun 2026
Mixed-Methods UX Research Intern
TikTok · Global Monetization, Product & Technology
· Led mixed-methods research into ad rejection for a platform used by 7.5M U.S. businesses, identifying how unclear rejection reasoning disrupted advertiser trust and campaign workflows. My findings shaped redesigns to rejection emails, in-product notifications, and appeal experiences, making policy decisions easier for advertisers to understand and act on.
· Worked across Product, Design, Policy, Data Science, and Ad Education to translate research into roadmap and product priorities, connecting advertiser pain points to campaign efficiency and helping teams balance the advertiser experience with policy and monetization goals.
Jun 2025 — Sept 2025
UX Designer
Human Factors International
· Owned the end-to-end design of a corporate learning platform, moving from customer research and business requirements through information architecture, interaction design, and implementation. The resulting experience restructured how enterprise customers discovered, compared, and evaluated training offerings across the platform.
· Worked directly with Engineering and leadership throughout development, using customer needs alongside technical feasibility and commercial priorities to shape what was built rather than treating design as a downstream deliverable.
Jun 2023 — Aug 2024
UX Designer and Researcher
Depicentre Consulting
· Designed and facilitated participatory research for the EUNIC Fair Collaboration Toolkit, turning conversations about inequity in international cultural partnerships into practical principles and tools that were adopted by 15+ cultural organizations.
· Co-led workshops, surveys, and synthesis across Meeting Point, Mini Meeting Point, and AIGA shiftED, bringing together 50+ design and technology practitioners whose input shaped subsequent toolkit and program decisions.
May — Aug 2021
Projects
UX Designer
Optimizely
· Redesigned Optimizely’s Variant Editor, a core workflow within an experimentation platform generating 390B test impressions annually, rethinking how marketers make site-wide and experiment-specific changes without losing visibility or control.
· My explorations across AI-assisted editing, site-level styles, change management, and advanced code established a scalable direction for the editor, supporting simpler experimentation for marketers while preserving the flexibility required by advanced enterprise users. Partnered with Product and Engineering to align the experience with technical constraints and longer-term product needs.
Jan 2025 — Mar 2025
UX Designer
BioDepot LLC
· Led the 0→1 MVP design of BioDepot’s mobile genomics experience for researchers at Fred Hutch Cancer Center, working directly with researchers to understand how sample monitoring and high-priority decisions changed when they were away from their workstations.
· My research and early concepts helped shift the product direction from recreating the desktop platform on mobile to designing around researchers’ highest-value on-the-go tasks. This became the foundation for an MVP centered on sample monitoring, AI-generated summaries, and issue resolution, developed alongside BioDepot stakeholders and researchers.
Jun 2024 — Aug 2024
Education
W
MS in Human-Centered Design and Engineering
University of Washington, Seattle
Sept 2024 — June 2026
S
BDes in Human-Centered Design
Srishti Institute of Art, Design, and Technology, Bangalore
Jul 2018 — Apr 2022
Community
HCI4SouthAsia
Contribute to ongoing research, workshops, and community initiatives advancing HCI research and education across South Asia, including co-organizing the Advancing HCI Research and Education within and across South Asia workshop at CHI 2023.
Dec 2022 — Present
Women in Informatics
Mentored high school and early-career students entering UX through hackathons, portfolio reviews, and career workshops, helping students translate early interests into projects and pathways into the field.
Dec 2025 — Jun 2026
Sitara Akka
Co-developed accessible Math and Science Teacher Instruction Kits with Vision Empower Trust for students with visual impairments, later published on Subodha, a nationwide accessible-learning platform in India.
Apr 2022 — Jun 2023
ORBIT Project
Peer-reviewed 5 proposals for the forthcoming Creative Resilience book by Kelly M. Murdoch-Kitt and Denielle J. Emans, contributing academic review and feedback on emerging design scholarship.
Aug 2022
Skills
Design
Interaction Design, Visual Design, Information Architecture, Design Systems, Wireframing, Prototyping, User Flows, High-Fidelity Mockups, Responsive Design, Accessibility (WCAG)
Research & Strategy
User Research, Usability Testing, User Interviews, Journey Mapping, Task Analysis, Heuristic Evaluation, Competitive Analysis, Data-Informed Design, Product Strategy, A/B Testing
Tools
Figma, FigJam, Adobe Creative Suite, ProtoPie, Framer, Miro, Google Analytics, Hotjar, HTML/CSS, Cursor, Lovable, Claude Code, Vercel, V0, Nano Banana, Midjourney