Namma Chennai
This was my first case study : done right as I was leaving architecture for product design, with more conviction than skill. I'd just quit my job, was leaving the city that had been home for years, and saw a billboard for Chennai's official citizen-services app on my way out. Installed it on the train ride home, found it rough, and decided to redesign it. No brief, no client, just a city I owed something to and a new discipline I was trying to prove to myself I could do.
Product Design
What it actually taught me wasn't about Figma or UI polish. It was the stuff architecture hadn't prepared me for: how research actually changes a brief (I went in assuming the app needed a facelift, came out realizing most people didn't even know it existed), how information architecture is a design decision and not an afterthought, and how much weight UX writing carries when there's no one in the room to explain the feature to a confused user. I also started using generative AI here for the first time in a real project — not to generate the design, but to move faster through the parts that weren't the point: imagery, filler content, pacing the narrative. Direction over delegation, even back then.
