Saurabh N. - 18680 User Experience Designer from Toronto

I am currently in my last semester of the post-graduate program at Humber College, Toronto, ON, and I have previous management experience in the hospitality industry as a culinary manager. During my time in the hospitality industry, I worked with prominent brands like the Radisson and IHG, where I was responsible for handling operations generating a departmental annual revenue of CAD 1.5Million. The global pandemic made me steer my goal post from the kitchen to software while keeping the core design thinking concepts intact. I started my educational journey in this field by pursuing a Diploma in UX at BrainStation, which allowed me to build my foundation. During this journey, I worked on various projects in different domains like healthcare, logistics and QSR fast food. It allowed me to work on design sprints and participate in Hackathon by McDonald’s with a multi-disciplinary team. My current education journey at Humber College helped me to build a solid research base by working on end-to-end team projects like Netflix and Starbucks, which involved the application of various research and synthesis methods, including user interviews, heuristic evaluation, ethnography, surveys, affinity mapping and usability testing. Switching gears to the UX industry made me realize how the design thinking process has been applied unconsciously in my journey as a chef. As the head of the culinary team at Radisson and Crowne Plaza hotels, I created and designed menus based on competitor analysis and tested them with internal stakeholders to ensure that our guests' needs were met. This is why I believe that my learnings and empathetic attitude from the hospitality industry would help me understand users' pain points and needs from a unique perspective.