Officially, it's Nafees-ul Haque, but please, call me Nafees. I'm a product designer and a recent Computer Science graduate from Vanderbilt University.

Product design wasn't my plan going into college. It ended up taking a stint in an HCI lab, a product management internship, and a stretch as a UX researcher to realise that product design was what I actually wanted. Each one kept circling the same question: why do things work the way they do, and how could they work better.

In retrospect, it probably shouldn't have taken that many steps. Growing up, I was always paying attention to things other people didn't seem to register — why the PSP's XMB menu made immediate sense the moment you picked it up, or why YouTube gradually buried the subscription feed in favour of recommendations and how that felt like a different set of priorities quietly winning some internal argument in a Mountain View conference room. I'd been noticing that kind of thing for years before I had a word for it, and still do, if you want to compare notes.