Hello, I’m Avani!
Fun fact: Avani translates to 🌎 “Earth” in Sanskrit.
🔈 Unsure how to pronounce it?
I design SaaS products that are hard to design — complex workflows, legacy systems, high-stakes UX.
I have a CS degree and a designer's eye, which means I've sat on both sides of the table. I know what's technically possible, what's a week of work versus a day, and where design decisions quietly become engineering nightmares.
Check out my product design work or poke through my resumé.
I didn't stumble into this…scroll down to see how I engineered it.👇
💡My design philosophy didn't come from a textbook, it came from lived frustration. 😣
As a petite, left-handed Indian-American woman, I grew up in a world that wasn't built for me. Everything was too big, too high, designed around someone else's body.
That frustration became a design instinct early. In a foundational studio class, for simple pop art assignment I reimagined a cell phone at 6 feet tall, turned into my first real UX question: What would actually reduce fatigue, regardless of hand size or preference? I didn't have the vocabulary for universal design yet. But I was already doing it.
🙋🏾♀️ Asking bigger questions.
Learning Gujarati software, sold around the world!
“How could the children of immigrants better connect with their heritage? “
During visits to India, especially outside the major cities, I noticed how quickly English signage disappeared. As someone who speaks Gujarati fluently but reads it only at a foundational level, I understood firsthand how language barriers quietly erode connection to culture. Children of immigrants often face this double displacement: fluent in the culture they grew up in, but at arm's length from the one they came from.
What started as my senior thesis became a commercially sold product. I designed a Gujarati literacy app for kids who grew up speaking the language at home but never learned to read it.
Long before Duolingo, I was designing for multilingual, real-world contexts and learning that the best design problems are the ones you've lived yourself.
Many signs are English words, phonetically spelled out.
🧠 Design thinking
My first physical computing project (using microcontrollers) involved a game of Pong to trigger custom audio when the ball hit a paddle.
“What is your goal?”
“Who is your audience?”
My fine arts education taught me to think in concepts, iterate through critique, and care deeply about craft. I carried those instincts through years of early web and multimedia work, but it wasn't until I stood in front of a classroom that I understood how foundational these two questions really were.
Students would dive straight into the tool. It drove me crazy… not because tools don't matter, but because tools change. What doesn't change is why you're making something and who it's for.
Teaching forced me to say that out loud, and once I did, I couldn't unsay it.
I rebuilt the CS 101 curriculum with that philosophy at its core for everyone who had ever felt like an outsider in a technical room. Because fun is not a nice-to-have in learning, it's a multiplier. Why calculate compound interest on a command line when you could make Pong? Both teach logic. Only one makes you want to come back tomorrow. Rebuilding classic games taught algorithmic thinking, geometry, and collision detection — but more importantly, it taught students that programming could feel like play.
Fine arts also taught me something that industry often forgets: constraints are not the enemy of creativity. They are the conditions that make creativity possible.
🧩 Reimagining how we learn through the lens of gamification
“Do not stand behind the horse treadmill, otherwise you will get pelted with manure”.
Outside of teaching, I explored games as powerful learning tools: leveraging pattern recognition, interaction, and a bit of humor to make abstract concepts more tangible. One such project, d0uble t1me, was a large-scale interactive installation that helped users understand binary numbers through the tactile satisfaction of hitting large objects.
In collaboration with the Equine Science Center, I designed a series of mini-games to inspire curiosity about both horses and science in younger audiences. My field research left an impression.
The game journey began in the barn, where players selected and prepared their horse. They then managed a treadmill session, collected blood samples, and carried out lab procedures including sample prep and analysis. The goal was to simulate the center’s real-world research in an accessible, engaging format.
🪡 Woven throughout my work, a passion for problem-solving is clear.
Whether in teaching, game design, or SaaS, I’ve always been drawn to complex systems—and to making them easier for people to understand and use. From setting up automated services to decoding binary, I care about designing experiences that meet people where they are.
These days, I spend my time in SaaS product design, thinking about how to make tools more intuitive, scalable, and human. I'm always looking for opportunities to keep learning, solve meaningful problems, and make room for more people at the table.