Hi, I’m Ritika

• Product Designer
• Currently at Zelle^®
• Based in NYC

I'm a product designer who never intended to be one. I studied psychology at Arizona State and was headed for medicine, mostly because I figured design was a hobby and I was just a little too fussy about details.

Certain things bugged me more than they probably should have, like the elevator panel where the close door button does nothing, or the settings menu that hides the one thing everyone is looking for. Then I took a UX elective in my last semester and it all made sense. Here was a job that took those small annoyances seriously and leaned on everything I'd learned about how people actually behave.

I got my first industry experience at Zelle, working on systems used by millions of people, and alongside it built an academic understanding of the craft with a master's in Information Experience Design at Pratt Institute. Since then I've worked on consumer products and on newer tech, most recently designing with AI while trying to keep it feeling human. I love the quiet decisions people never notice but can feel. Lately I've been drawn to the parts of software that are still being figured out, where nobody has settled on the right gesture or even what to call a thing.

The rest of my design story lives in my projects 🌷