--- title: "Shandar Junaid - Founder, Principal Designer in Bengaluru | Tal" description: "Meet Shandar Junaid, Director, Product Design & UX | AI-Driven Experiences & Design Systems | 25 yrs across Adobe, Citrix, Paylocity, Wipro | CUA™ based in Bengaluru. AI stack includes anthropic apis, antigravity, and claude code. Explore public work links including github." image: "https://tal.club/meet/shandar-junaid/share-image" --- # Shandar Junaid on Tal ## Headline Director, Product Design & UX \| AI\-Driven Experiences & Design Systems \| 25 yrs across Adobe, Citrix, Paylocity, Wipro \| CUA™ ## About For 25 years I've been designing products that make complex technology feel effortless — and turning design into a measurable driver of business outcomes\. I've led design organizations at Adobe, Citrix, Wipro, and Paylocity, scaled teams from a handful to a 100\+, shipped enterprise and consumer products used by millions, and built design systems that cut time\-to\-ship and lifted adoption\. Today I run Affordance Design Studio, where I help companies build responsible, AI\-driven products that balance usability, ethics, and intelligence\. ## Location Bengaluru ## AI stack anthropic apis antigravity claude code claude codex deepseek ## Work experience Founder, Principal Designer at Affordance Design, Sep 2025 \- Present · 1 yr, Affordance Design Studio is where UX strategy, long\-term thinking, and AI experimentation come together to build products with intent and integrity\. The studio is currently focused on solving a few deeply broken patterns in the digital world: • How people understand complexity: Through TimeLineX, an interactive timeline intelligence platform that helps people see how ideas, products, movements, and systems actually unfold over time\. It moves beyond fragmented search into structured narrative thinking\. Context over chaos\. Signal over noise\. • How people learn to build, not just consume: Through CTRL\+SURVIVE, a satirical browser game built and shipped with AI, reflecting modern career anxiety, AI disruption, burnout, and skill gaps\. It is playful on the surface, but underneath it pushes a serious question\. Are we preparing people to survive the systems we build, or to redesign them? • How work gets done: By building focused AI microservices that reduce friction, simplify workflows, and quietly make everyday tasks easier without increasing cognitive load\. Practical AI\. Invisible intelligence\. Real utility\. • How hiring feels: Through an AI\-driven recruitment platform on a seed\-fund path, designed to make job discovery and talent matching more human, contextual, and fair\. Less keyword roulette\. More meaningful alignment\. This is less about tools\. More about reshaping how we think, build, and navigate the digital world\. Affordance Design Studio is shaped by decades of design leadership across companies like Adobe, Citrix, Wipro, and Reliance, but it is not a legacy practice\. It’s a space for unlearning, rebuilding, and shipping products that emerge from curiosity, persistence, and first\-principles thinking\. This is not design for novelty\. It’s design for understanding, trust, and long\-term impact\. Affordance Design Studio\-Persistence as process\. Design as consequence\. Director of User Experience at Paylocity, Nov 2024 \- Aug 2025 · 10 mos, Led and mentored a team of 10\+ product designers and UX writers across multiple product workstreams\. Defined UX strategy across a spend management platform serving 10,000\+ finance users, prioritizing usability, accessibility, and value delivery\. Collaborated cross\-functionally with Product, Engineering, and Customer Success to deliver cohesive experiences, including Airbase feature integration into Paylocity Mobile\. Introduced lightweight UX metrics including System Usability Scale \(SUS\), Net Promoter Score \(NPS\), and in\-app surveys, resulting in measurable uplift in user satisfaction and task success rates\. Vice President of Product Design at Qualys, Aug 2024 \- Nov 2024 · 4 mos, Led and mentored a team of 20 product designers across Qualys cybersecurity product lines\. Defined UX roadmap and established collaborative, optimized handoff processes between Design and Engineering\. Aligned UX direction with product strategy during a period of organizational transition\. Director of Product Design at Citrix, Dec 2022 \- Jan 2024 · 1 yr 2 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, Building empowering software with Trust and Empathy\! Design Evangelist/Strategic Development Manager at Adobe, Jan 2018 \- Dec 2022 · 5 yrs, Trained 5,000\+ designers across India on Adobe XD; increased enterprise adoption and boosted productivity by 20%\. Conducted 200\+ Design Thinking workshops for IBM, TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Capgemini, Cognizant, Deloitte, and Accenture\. Defined and led initiatives for broad adoption of Adobe XD and Creative Cloud within enterprise design teams\. Drove industry engagement through white papers, conference presentations, and community programs\. Evangelist at Adobe, Jan 2018 \- Dec 2022 · 5 yrs, Trained 5,000\+ designers across India on Adobe XD; increased enterprise adoption and boosted productivity by 20%\. Conducted 200\+ Design Thinking workshops for IBM, TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Capgemini, Cognizant, Deloitte, and Accenture\. Defined and led initiatives for broad adoption of Adobe XD and Creative Cloud within enterprise design teams\. Drove industry engagement through white papers, conference presentations, and community programs\. ## Education Certified Usability Analyst™, User Centred Design and Analysis, Human Factors International Bachelor of Commerce \(B\.Com\.\), E\-Commerce/Electronic Commerce, The Bhowanipur Education Society College ## Public links - github: https://github\.com/shandar [View the original profile](https://tal.club/meet/shandar-junaid) ```json { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@graph": [ { "@type": "Person", "@id": "https://tal.club/meet/shandar-junaid#person", "name": "Shandar Junaid", "url": "https://tal.club/meet/shandar-junaid", "image": "https://tal.club/meet/shandar-junaid/profile-photo.jpg", "description": "Meet Shandar Junaid, Director, Product Design & UX | AI-Driven Experiences & Design Systems | 25 yrs across Adobe, Citrix, Paylocity, Wipro | CUA™ based in Bengaluru. AI stack includes anthropic apis, antigravity, and claude code. 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