The Nursery of Character
Experience design isn’t only what I do for a living. It’s what I’m genuinely passionate about, and the thread that ties together everything I’ve collected along the way.
I believe its roots go back to my childhood. I was a reader first, always lost in storybooks, and at nine years old I started writing my own fiction. I didn’t stop at the words. I drew the covers and sketched the inside pages too, turning every picture in my head into something on paper. Looking back, that was the first spark of something I still rely on today: empathy for other people’s stories. It also pulled me deeper into literature, and into learning about cultures far beyond my own.
School is where storytelling found a stage. I hosted events in both Sinhala and English, and those moments sparked a bigger dream: to be in front of the camera.
After school I studied journalism and professional media at a media academy, graduated top of my batch, and earned a place at Colombo TV. There I lived that dream as a television presenter and news producer.
In 2018, while at university, I published my first novel, Sasala Diye Ruwa Soya (Finding the Reflection in the Rippling Water), a story I had written back in 2010.
Years later, I work in a very different corner of the tech industry. But I still feel those roots in every problem I solve. Every user journey is a story, and every good design starts by listening to it.
Knock on the UX door
In 2018 I completed my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Colombo. My final-year electives were HCI, game development and machine learning, and HCI is where UX first caught my attention.
At the time, UX was still a young field in Sri Lanka, and internships that matched what I wanted to do were hard to find. I started my career at Epic Lanka, a technology company that builds IT solutions for banks, financial institutions and government organisations, as an intern UI/UX engineer. The role covered both design and front-end development.
What I valued most was the early exposure to real projects. Working across different clients and products gave me a strong grounding in both design and development for B2C products. I was part of a collaborative UX team that helped each other hit project milestones, and on several projects I took on the role of lead UX resource, working directly with the wider project team.
One of my first big projects was NDB NEOS for NDB Bank, Sri Lanka’s first phygital banking app, combining traditional banking with everyday merchant payments. There was no local precedent for mobile banking UX at the time. The app went on to win the top award at the National Best Quality Software Awards 2021 and was named the Most Innovative Digital Banking Product in Sri Lanka by Global Business Outlook UK in 2021.
Then the pandemic arrived. Local businesses were pushed to keep operating online, and the insurance industry was among the hardest hit, because its customer-agent interactions still relied on legacy manual workflows. I had the opportunity to work with Ceylinco Life, one of the largest life insurers in Sri Lanka, to deliver CeyLife Digital, a mobile app that let their customers self-serve so the business could keep running.
Launching something entirely new, and making it succeed in such a diverse market, was not an easy leap. Understanding the local business, studying international products, and balancing client requirements against a good experience for users with low digital literacy became the biggest lessons of my career at that time.
From individual contributor to UX lead
The more I worked in UX, the more I wanted to learn. Beyond the foundations from my degree, I went deeper into UX principles through online courses and materials, and they opened my eyes to UX research and usability testing, not just UI design. I wanted a role where I could do UX full time, at enterprise scale, with real depth.
In 2021 I joined IFS as a UX designer, the career shift I’d been looking for. I started as the only UX resource in my product area. Getting to grips with enterprise software, its technical constraints and its highly technical personas was a challenge at first. The harder part was the mindset: the team saw the product through a technical lens, and aligning everyone on a user-centric direction took time.
So I ran workshops and sessions to build awareness of user experience across the team. Alongside improving the product itself, raising the team’s UX maturity, from Level 2 to Level 5 on the UX maturity model, became one of the achievements I’m proudest of from my early years at IFS.
As the organisation put more weight on user experience, I was able to recruit and onboard new UX designers and, together with designers across the organisation, form a UX team within the product area. We set up a UX way of working from scratch, including a UX review gate before front-end code is merged, which standardised how designers and developers collaborate and cut late-stage defects.
Over the years I grew into the Lead Product Designer role, leading the UX for the Lifecycle Experience Center transformation and adapting to a fast-changing industry along the way.
What I value most about IFS is the chance to work with the latest technology and industry practices in UX, especially in this fast-moving AI era. The ownership and trust leadership gave me have shaped my capabilities and taken my career into a new dimension. And I still enjoy what I came here for: end-to-end involvement in every part of an industry-standard UX workflow.
Giving back what I learned
My journey was never a solo walk. I became who I am today thanks to the support and knowledge of the great people around me, so giving that back to the next generation feels like my own responsibility.
Alongside my day job, I share what I’ve learned whenever I can. UX Seed, my YouTube channel, is my personal initiative to do exactly that, built for impact rather than money or reputation. Everything on it is free for anyone. It brings together everything I’ve learned in UX with the skills from my television career, which let me produce it entirely on my own, in both English and Sinhala.
Beyond YouTube, I give guest lectures on HCI and UX methodology to university students across Sri Lanka, and I judge competitions and hackathons to help spot and encourage young talent. Through these sessions, I’ve mentored more than 1,000 students as they shape their future careers in UX.
I also run workshops for industry professionals. For me, it’s all part of the same goal: sharing what I’ve learned, and sparking the next generation to make the industry better.
