Khushali Sandhi is a shining example of how one can turn a passion into a profession and work on the most important facet of human and technical interaction – user experience design’s endless potential.
Khushali started her career in 2009 as a front-end developer in India and realized her passion for addressing customer issues and designing solutions. Today she is a Senior User Experience Designer at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and uses her skills to create complex cloud-based database solutions. Her projects are a perfect example of how she is able to work at the intersection of the most innovative technologies and user experience design while being a creative thinker and a technical expert.
Khushali has also been very versatile and has proved that she is multi-talented throughout her working experience. It is possible to observe that her professional development is characterized by the expanding scope of her design paradigm, which focuses on the impact of the designed experience on people. It is more than utilitarian, she aims to make technology not only useful but fun in its essence.
From codes to emotions
From the front-end engineer to the Senior UX Designer at Amazon, Khushali Sandhi’s transition from coding to emotional intelligence is marked by a very smooth process. She kicked off her career at Infosys and worked on projects for Apple Inc. Gradually, she took more design roles and finally became an expert in design and development integration. Looking back at the time she started, she said: “In 2009, UX design was a new field, and I didn’t know this could be a full-time role on its own. So, I was doing designs and development both,”
Over the course of her career and at Cignex Datamatics in particular, Khushali’s interest in user experience design grew. Dealing with end-users made her feel the happiness of the job done to end-users and the feeling of the result achieved made her to feel the importance of the job done. This increasing passion led her to take a Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction Design at Indiana University Bloomington, the turning point towards UX.
After her graduate level education, Khushali has been working only as a UX designer which she says was a conscious decision and was fulfilling. “Since graduation, I have been working purely as a UX designer,” she notes, highlighting her transformation from a technically grounded developer to a designer driven by empathy and user advocacy.
The heart of interaction
This was not something that Khushali Sandhi decided to suddenly venture into as emotional design but the outcome of gradual realizations built on user feedback. “My interest in emotional design sparked after I started gathering feedback from customers on my designs more often,” she recalls.
Experiencing the whole spectrum of feelings from confusion and curiosity to satisfaction, Khushali was able to understand how much the instinctive design affected this user. This realization made her start exploring users’ emotions and as such, she gained a better empathy.
This journey made her to accept the contextual design as the kind of design that takes into consideration the life of the user. An example of this method is Patient Zero for Harvard Business Publishing – a leadership simulation that was developed by her. Therefore, she employed methods such as mood boards and narrative design to construct the wanted emotional experiences to the intended user experience.
Khushali also emphasizes on the aspect of emotional design thinking right from the concept development stage to the realization stage and to the assessment stage. That way for her is not only functionality but customer satisfaction and joy at the achieved result.
Adapting to diverse user emotions
Khushali Sandhi uses emotive design in her work effectively and with purpose. She breaks the user experience into three distinct phases: onboarding, engagement and retention. “From the time customers encounter the product, to the time customers finish using the product, there are emotions that form the experience,” she explains.
Models of communication used in the onboarding phase Her Key objective here is to ensure positive initial impressions as they get on-boarded while at the same time making sure that emerging issues from users are dealt with as soon as possible. Through the user input, she pays attention to the time taken in the process and more importantly the satisfaction of the users in the whole process of the design. While moving through the journey, Khushali’s designs are all about creating value, guiding the users on what to do next and giving them the feeling of success that will make them want to come back.
“Every step involves customer emotions which impact the next stage,” she notes, underscoring her deep commitment to understanding and designing for users’ emotional journeys across diverse industries.
A case study in feelings
For the Renaissance project, Khushali Sandhi used emotional design to redesign the way district administrators engage with reports on school performance. One of the important steps in this process was identification of the fact that administrators were frustrated with the reporting tools that are used in the organization at the moment.
Khushali was able to determine that a vast number of administrators relied on Excel-based KPIs, which are not only vulnerable to human error. With these insights in mind, she came up with a design solution that would somehow counter their frustrations as well as their needs. Her approach was to focus on the most important measures, bring in easier to understand colored codes for clearer vision, and make the report sharing process easier.
The first response of administrators when they saw the redesigned tools was positive and energetic which was an indication of how much the solution met the requirements of the administrators. The new design not only optimized their work but also the amount of time and energy that was previously spent on numerous manual operations was minimized.
Mentorship with heart
In her role as a judge and a mentor in UX design, Khushali Sandhi also stresses the aspects of the users’ emotional experience. “Unfolding the problems and the understanding of customers’ mindset helps in learning the customer emotions,” she explains, stressing the need for a deep exploration of client concerns.
Khushali helps the new designers to understand that there are different needs of different users and highlights how important it is to be able to empathize with users. In addition to mentoring, she supports the concept of early user participation and uses various research methods to capture user feelings and needs. She emphasizes the importance of techniques like evaluating the tickets, customer support, and surveying as well as metrics to construct the user needs map.
Using tools such as personas, customer journey maps as well as user flows, designers can find out when a product may be interacting with a user and how to design solutions that reflect the nature of the users. Khushali’s approach is based on her understanding of these tools as being fundamental to designing for meaning and for users.
Milestones of emotional engagement
Khushali Sandhi describes her “biggest milestone” as the transition from engineering to design—a shift that went beyond a change in job title. It defined a shift towards using creativity to solve practical user problems.
Her decision to study for a Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) highlighted her desire to break deeper into the psychological aspect of users, which armed with new research tools would allow her to analyze customer anguish and emotions with great efficacy.
While working for Forio, which specializes in business simulations, Khushali got an understanding of how emotions affect design. “I aimed to evoke positive emotions in every product I designed,” she shares. But the business simulations also functioned as games, helping students grasp various business concepts.” This situation helped her to build the skill to embrace the emotional aspect while at the same time achieving learning objectives.
Currently, at Amazon Web Services (AWS), Khushali is proud to be helping millions of users’ experiences. She stresses that her work involves teaming up with individuals which is why she is sure that empathy and creativity are key factors in her team. “Here, everyone is deeply focused on customer pain points and the emotions behind them,” she notes, reflecting the user-centered approach that drives her design philosophy.
The future of UX and emotional design
Khushali Sandhi believes in the future where automation and AI are used to improve user’s interactions and create positive emotional impact. “Looking ahead, I see automation becoming an integral part of customer workflows, helping to evoke positive emotions,” she observes, emphasizing the power of these technologies to simplify interactions.
However, Khushali also admits to the challenges of AI implementation, asking if it is applicable in different scenarios and if it will increase user satisfaction. This can be attributed to the fact that she holds the view that implementation of the systems should be done carefully with respect to the context of the users in order to satisfy the various needs.
In Khushali’s opinion, emotional design will always be a part of UX regardless of the advancements in technology. She emphasizes that no matter how much tools evolve, the main point is to achieve user expectations and to evoke positive feelings. ‘’If customers are not satisfied or do not get a positive feeling, they will look for other products or solutions that meet their needs,’’ she says.
Studying the case of Khushali, one can understand the usage of technology as a way to combine the idea of affective UX and the value of emotionally based solutions. It is rich with advice for designers and shows the long-term effects that emotional design can have on the relationships that people have with technology.
