hi, i'm hafsa - a designer based in Germany, currently working as an instructional designer at SAP with 4+ years across ui/ux, research, and creative work behind me.
if i had to describe what i actually do for a living, it's noticing things; how people gesture with their hands when they're mid-thought, which stairs everyone skips, why some kettles feel friendly and others feel like a small threat, which chairs everyone gravitates to in a room and which ones stay empty. the design part comes after. i just happen to like the noticing more than most.
the turning point
How I got here?
i started out thinking design was about making things look nice. or at least that's what they taught us for the longest time. then in 2020 I came across a talk, framing design as a problem-solving tool, and something clicked. design wasn't decoration, it was infrastructure. that year i took courses on service design and design for social change, and started noticing the world differently, why crosswalks are painted where they are, the pill bottles designed to defeat curious kids and enable arthritic adults at the same time, why some forms make you want to give up on page one. my thesis that year ended up being a board game about internalised misogyny in desi households.
designing for the second person
around then i also started questioning the design i was being taught, mostly swiss minimalism filtered through pinterest, which lands fine if your audience is design students who read english. it lands less well for the security guard outside our university, whose visual vocabulary was Urdu typography, truck art, mithai boxes, all maximalist, all confident. i've been trying to design for the second person ever since.
the career so far
my first job was editorial design at one of pakistan's biggest newspapers DAWN, because i love print and will defend it forever. then product design at Nayapay, a fintech, where i built dashboards and onboarding flows for a b2b platform and spent a lot of time watching finance teams work at speeds i didn't know were possible. then ended up as a instructional designer, diving into product learning, at SAP.
the freelance years
alongside that i've freelanced across different industries, building brand identities, packaging design, album art, children's books, protest posters, and designing for gender and human rights organisations. the range looks chaotic, but the thread is the same, design as a way to say something to actual people.
what i care about
the work i care about most lives where design meets social impact and accessibility, climate justice, disaster response, inclusive education for neurodivergent people. i've worked on AafatInfo, a crowdsourced disaster mapping platform for Pakistan, and more recently co-authored a couple of research paper on assistive reading systems for adults with ADHD. i hold an MA in Usability Engineering from Hochschule Rhein-Waal.
where i'm headed
i'd rather be called a thinker or a problem-solver than a designer. right now i'm slowly turning myself into a design engineer, learning to actually build the things I used to just prototype.
off the clock, the "paying attention to small things" habit follows me everywhere, so my hobbies are basically a personality stuck in a loop.
there's a page of Murdle with my morning coffee, a jigsaw puzzle slowly colonising the table and a desk that is, genuinely, my favourite place on earth. i leave it for chasing sunsets (i have an embarrassing number of sky photos on my phone), for travel whenever i can swing it, and for art markets where i sell my illustrations.
i'm currently trying to bake my own sourdough partly because i figure if i can produce a respectable loaf i'm legally a little bit german.
back home in pakistan, i have a lot of rescue cats - around 5 right now, which i bring up a lot because (a) come on, it's cats and (b) statistically, you should know this before we work together.
work experience in a nutshell
Instructional Designer
SAP
2025 - Present
Design & Experience Lead
AafatInfo
2024- 2025
Product Designer
NayaPay
2022 - 2024
still reading? here's the formal version with all the dates and acronyms.
hi, i’m hafsa - a designer and systems thinker. i design with the people the design is supposed to be for.
currently working as an instructional designer, occasionally dabbling with creating accessible learning tools, design activism, and the gap between what looks good and what actually works.
psst..
the mobile version is still in the oven - please view on desktop for the full thing :)