I spent five years studying architecture. And architecture, at its core, is about people. How they move through a space, how a room makes them feel, what they need without ever having to ask for it. I learned to think in systems. I learned that every decision, a doorway here, a window there, has a consequence for the person living inside it. That instinct was always there. I just didn't know yet where it belonged.

After graduating, I went looking. One of the things I tried was making themed gift hampers. But it was never really about the hampers. Every time a client came to me, I refused to just ask about the occasion. I wanted to know about the person they were gifting to. Their personality, their quirks, what made them light up. Because I wasn't putting things in a box and tying a ribbon around it. I was curating something that could only ever exist for that one specific person. Looking back, that was user research. I just didn't have a name for it yet.

Then came planning of themed parties. I was orchestrating sequences, surprises, the exact moment someone walks into a room and their face changes. I was thinking about flow, about emotion, about how an experience unfolds from beginning to end. Every detail was deliberate. Every element was there for a reason.

Along the way, I was introduced to UX design. I did a short course and landed an internship. Something clicked that hadn't clicked before. For the first time, I was designing for people with real, tangible problems. A form that was too long. A flow that assumed too much. A product that forgot there was a human on the other side. These weren't aesthetic problems. They were human problems. And solving them felt more meaningful than anything I'd done before.

What kept me completely hooked was the intersection. I'm an advocate for the user, but I'm also thinking about what the business needs to achieve. I'm holding both at the same time, and my job is to find the answer that honours both. That tension, I discovered, is where the most interesting design decisions live. And five years in, it still is.

The years that followed took me places I hadn't expected. I've helped global engineering teams at Scania coordinate across borders, built a mental health platform for United Nations personnel where privacy wasn't a feature, it was the foundation, and designed AI-powered tools that turned weeks of manual work into minutes. Each project came with its own constraints, its own users, its own version of the same question. What does this person actually need, and am I giving it to them?

The scale has changed enormously, but the question hasn't.