Nudgi · Behaviour design and mobile application

A gentler way to answer the message you keep meaning to answer

A messaging app built around social accountability, where a friend can send a light nudge on a conversation you have not replied to yet.

The problem

Replying to a message takes under a minute, yet these are precisely the tasks people postpone for days. My working question was why a task that small becomes that heavy. The literature pointed at the five-minute rule and at context switching, but the interesting part was not the delay itself. It was the residue: the low, continuous mental load of carrying an unanswered message around, and the guilt that grows the longer the reply is owed.

Baseline research

I ran a three-part study: a pre-study interview, a five-day diary study in which participants logged social micro-responsibilities they had delayed, and a post-study interview. The diary format mattered because these tasks are frequent and highly context-dependent, so they are almost impossible to recall accurately after the fact. One finding arrived for free: several participants reported that keeping the diary made them more responsive on its own, which was early evidence that mere awareness is itself an intervention.

From assumption to design

Before building anything I mapped every assumption the concept rested on against two axes, how important it was and how much evidence actually supported it, then tested the ones sitting in the dangerous quadrant: important and unevidenced. The central assumption was that a nudge from a friend would read as care rather than as pressure. That single question determined the entire tone of the product.

The resulting scope was deliberately narrow. Account creation with an avatar, an inbox with read and unread state, manual nudges sent with a single tap from inside a conversation, and automatic self-nudges scheduled for the times of day a person is most likely to reply. Nudged conversations rise to the top of the inbox, and every nudge can be answered, snoozed or switched off. The snooze was not a convenience feature; it was the mechanism that keeps the whole system from becoming another source of guilt.

Branding

The visual language had to do the emotional work. An app that reminds you of an obligation can very easily feel like a manager, so the brand leans soft and warm: a rounded, friendly type pairing, a muted palette built on dusty blue and cream rather than alert colours, and a penguin mascot that users choose and dress. Picking a penguin during onboarding is a small piece of ownership before the app ever asks anything of you.

Outcome

Each round of prototypes, from low to medium to high fidelity, went through usability testing, and the tone of the nudge copy was revised more often than any interface element. The finished prototype demonstrates the full loop: a conversation goes unanswered, a nudge arrives, and the reply becomes the easiest thing to do next rather than the heaviest.

Roots · Mobile application

Helping immigrant families talk across two cultures

A mobile app of guided lessons, conversation games and a shared scrapbook, built so that immigrant parents can learn culturally specific communication skills and practise them with their children.

Overview

Immigrant parents and their children often struggle to connect across cultural and generational distance. The premise of Roots is that this is a learnable skill rather than a fixed condition: the app teaches a communication concept, gives the family a low-pressure way to practise it together, and keeps a record of what came out of it.

The research began with nine interviews spanning parents, teenagers and a clinical expert, recruited deliberately across ages, cultural backgrounds and socioeconomic contexts. Synthesising those conversations through empathy mapping produced a consistent tension: everyone wanted closeness, and nobody had culturally specific tools for reaching it. Parents wanted to connect but did not know how to begin the conversation; children wanted the same and read the silence as disinterest.

The pivot

The most consequential decision came out of low-fidelity testing. The original concept served parent and child as equal users in one interface. Testing showed that their needs diverge sharply, and that a dual-user design actually weakened the product: parents engaged less readily when the experience was also addressed to their children, and the shared surface made the vulnerable parts feel observed rather than safe.

So the design narrowed to a single primary user, the parent, learning culturally relevant communication skills and then initiating practice with their child. Narrowing the audience made every subsequent decision easier, and it is the change that turned a broad idea into a usable product.

The build

I worked as an app developer on the prototype, built in React Native with Expo so that one codebase could run on both platforms without configuring native projects, and backed by Supabase for authentication, translated game content and lightweight run metadata. Internationalisation runs through react-i18next, which made a genuine language toggle possible rather than a mocked one.

The prototype implements one deliberate end-to-end path, lesson, then game, then scrapbook, in order to test the interaction model rather than to stand up a full curriculum engine. Game content is stored remotely and randomised at fetch time so that repeat sessions differ, while the lesson structure remains fixed. Deciding what to build honestly and what to stage was itself part of the work: an onboarding survey signals how the app could adapt to household context, and the documentation states plainly which behaviours are real and which are still curated.

Dosti Project · Stanford Indo-Pak Dosti Forum · Brand identity and growth

Branding a friendship the region is taught not to want

The visual identity, merchandise and audience growth behind a student movement asking India and Pakistan to imagine a relationship built by people rather than states.

The brief

Dosti Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit I co-founded to build cultural connection between India and Pakistan, two countries whose citizens have spent more than seventy-five years as neighbours who cannot easily visit one another. Borders close, visas are refused, and for most people on either side the other country arrives only through a news cycle built for outrage. That was the market this brand had to enter: not a product with a clear benefit, but a relationship an audience had been taught to distrust.

The strategic decision that shaped every design choice that followed was this: lead with similarity, never with difference. The politics between the two countries are genuinely difficult, but the culture is not. The same language is spoken with a different script, the same food is argued over under different names, and the music, humour and streets are shared. The identity needed to read as home to someone in Lahore and someone in Delhi at once, without flattening either into the other. I rejected anything neutral or diplomatic in tone, because neutrality reads as distance, and distance was the problem the brand existed to solve.

The mark

I resolved that strategy into a single wordmark. Dosti means friendship, and the word belongs equally to Urdu and Hindi, so I built the logo to be read three ways at once: Latin letterforms carry the English, while their construction borrows the sweep of Nastaliq and the connected headline of Devanagari. It is deliberately one object rather than three translations placed side by side, because the argument of the movement is that these were never three separate things.

Growth

Alongside the identity, I led growth, taking the movement from a standing start to an audience of more than twelve thousand across both countries and the diaspora. My content strategy followed directly from the brand strategy: publish the overlap. Shared vocabulary, shared recipes, shared jokes, and split screens of two cities that look like one. I avoided political content entirely, not out of caution but because comment sections punish it while recognition travels. The best-performing posts were the ones where someone in Karachi and someone in Bombay tagged each other under the same image.

Merchandise

I applied the identity to objects people actually keep. One tote carries an illustrated inventory of things both countries claim and share: karak chai in its glass, a kite, a lotus, a dhol, a decorated rickshaw, a cricket bat, a mango. Another prints a dictionary entry for the word itself, defining dosti as chai, butter chicken, doctor bano ge ya engineer? and aur sunao?, until it is time for cricket.

Conference

The identity now carries the inaugural Stanford Indo-Pak Dosti Conference at the Hoover Institution, convening former heads of government, founders, investors, filmmakers and artists around people-led partnership. I extended the same system across the website, the printed programme and the physical environment.

I designed and set aside two earlier directions. The first leaned into plum as a full-bleed field, which read as formal and institutional, closer to a summit than a movement. The second framed a light page with the border motif running down both edges, which was warmer but pulled attention towards the ornament rather than the speakers. The published site keeps the motif as an accent and gives the room to the people in it.