Shantini S
Product Designer & UX Researcher
Singapore | +65 9737 1987 | shantini.sub@gmail.com
linkedin.com/in/shantinisub | shantini.me
Summary
Product designer and UX researcher with 7+ years of experience designing and researching digital products for government agencies and enterprise clients. I take work from discovery to delivery: user interviews and journey maps first, then wireframes and high-fidelity prototypes that I test with users before they reach engineering. I've done most of this as the only researcher-designer in agile product teams, so I'm used to owning the whole process.
Experience
Product Designer & Researcher (Freelance) | Self-employed, Singapore
2025 – Present- Designed and launched Slow Garden, a tarot app that pairs each of its 78 cards with a botanical scent. I handled the whole 0-to-1 process: user research, product design, prototyping and the written content.
- Built 18 automated workflows for AI-assisted research synthesis, which cut my analysis time roughly in half.
- Design visuals and guidebooks for CHANPURU, an independent culture and fashion magazine.
- Write Grin Theory, a newsletter about systems thinking and digital culture.
Product Designer & Researcher | Tribe (StackUp), Singapore
2022 – 2024- Sole researcher and product designer on a B2B platform, responsible for user research, UX design and UI design in an agile product team.
- Mapped the onboarding funnel, found where users dropped off and redesigned it. Conversion went up within two release cycles.
- Built and maintained an accessible design system used across 5+ applications.
- Ran journey mapping workshops and design studios with product, engineering and business stakeholders to agree on what we could build, then presented research findings and design decisions back to the same group.
Senior Researcher | Black Dot Research, Singapore
2019 – 2022- Led research programmes for government agencies, including Singapore's Land Transport Authority (LTA), from proposal through fieldwork to final recommendations.
- Ran ethnographic research, diary studies and quantitative surveys, some with samples in the thousands.
- Managed 3 to 5 projects at a time across transport, education, finance and social policy.
- Moderated bilingual focus groups with translators across Singapore's communities, and interviewed stakeholders up to ministerial level.
- Facilitated cross-agency workshops to connect research findings to policy direction. Built research templates and quality frameworks the team still uses.
Qualitative Researcher | Nielsen, Singapore
2018 – 2019- Ran multi-market qualitative research across APAC for clients including Suntory, IMDA, FairPrice and Little Caesars.
- Turned findings into recommendations that clients used to make market-entry decisions.
Skills
Design: Product design, UX design, UI design, interaction design, service design, information architecture, design systems, accessibility, wireframing, prototyping, user flows, AI-assisted design workflows
Research: User research, user interviews, contextual inquiry, ethnography, diary studies, focus groups, usability testing, journey mapping, concept validation, A/B testing, surveys, qualitative and quantitative analysis, behavioural data analysis, market segmentation, workshop facilitation, stakeholder management, systems thinking
Tools: Figma, Framer, Miro, Dovetail, Maze, Typeform, Qualtrics, GA4, Hotjar, Notion, Loom, Granola, Wispr Flow, Claude, Cursor, Codex, Magic Patterns, Gamma, Midjourney, Perplexity, n8n, Replit, Excel, Raycast, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, GitHub, Vercel