Hi thereI am Yasir.

The Website That Changed How I Think About Products

Around 2010, I built my own portfolio website.

I had designed it. I had built it. I put it online.

And almost nobody visited.

It was one of the most valuable failures of my early career.

A friend introduced me to SEO, and I began studying how people searched and how search engines understood websites. I implemented what I learned and eventually reached the first page of Google for relevant design searches.

The result was tangible: my website began generating two or three enquiries a day without paid advertising.

That experience taught me something that has influenced my thinking ever since:

“Building a product and getting people to use it are different problems.”

A product exists within a larger system of discovery, user intent, business objectives, technology, experience, and outcomes.

That is one of the reasons I naturally think beyond the interface today.

From Interfaces to Systems

As the products I worked on became more complex, my role evolved with them.

I moved deeper into UX, interaction design, information architecture, UI, and product design.

At the same time, my technical background continued to influence my work. I've worked with web technologies and platforms including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, WordPress, and Laravel, and I've spent years working closely with developers to take products from design into implementation.

That experience taught me to think about the system behind every interface:

• •What data drives this experience?
• •What are the business rules?
• •What happens in different states?
• •What are the edge cases?
• •What does engineering need to support?
• •Where are the technical constraints?
• •Where can we simplify the experience without compromising the underlying system?

I don't believe designers need to be engineers.

But I believe great product designers should be technically fluent enough to understand the systems they are designing and have meaningful conversations about trade-offs with engineering.

That is an important part of how I work.

Working on Rocket Internet

A defining chapter of my career was working on Rocket Internet's ecommerce venture in the Middle East, Namshi.

Working in that environment gave me experience inside a fast-moving technology startup, collaborating with designers, developers, managers, and other disciplines to build and evolve a real digital product.

It reinforced something that became central to my approach:

“Product design is a decision-making discipline.”

The work isn't simply about producing polished screens.

It's about understanding a problem deeply, identifying what matters, balancing competing constraints, exploring possible solutions, and helping a multidisciplinary team converge on the right one.

• •Users have needs.
• •Businesses have objectives.
• •Engineering has constraints.
• •Products have existing systems.
• •And teams have limited time and resources.

Good product design sits in the middle of all of those realities.

How I Approach Complex Problems

I don't start with Figma.

I start by understanding the problem.

I want to understand the business context, the users, the existing experience, the competitive landscape, the technology, and the constraints surrounding the product.

• •I study competitors.
• •I research user needs and behaviors.
• •I examine existing workflows.
• •I look at where users come from and what they expect before they enter the product.
• •I work through the information architecture and interaction model before moving into detailed interface design.
• •And throughout the process, I work closely with engineering and product.

The objective isn't to arrive at a beautiful design file.

The objective is to arrive at the right product decision.

Figma is where some of those decisions become visible. It isn't where they begin.

I Design Beyond the Screen

My early experience with SEO gave me an unusual perspective that I still carry into product work.

I learned that even an excellent digital experience can fail if nobody discovers it.

That led me to think about the complete journey:

Discovery → Intent → Experience → Trust → Action → Outcome

Today, the discovery layer is changing again.

People increasingly use AI systems and large language models to discover information, products, companies, and services.

I've been exploring this shift and how digital products need to become understandable not only to users, but also to the systems that help users discover them.

For me, this is not a departure from product design.

It's an extension of the same principle I've followed throughout my career:

“Understand the environment around the product, not just the interface inside it.”

What I Bring to a Product Team

After more than 15 years in digital design, I've developed a breadth of experience that allows me to operate across different parts of the product problem:

• •I can work from strategy into interaction design.
• •From user needs into information architecture.
• •From complex business logic into simple experiences.
• •From prototypes into conversations with engineering.
• •From the interface into the systems behind it.
• •And from the product itself into the ecosystem through which people discover and use it.

I care about craft, but I don't separate craft from strategy.

I care about usability, but I don't separate usability from business outcomes.

I care about technology, but I don't let technical complexity become the user's problem.

And I care about the details without losing sight of the larger product.

Still Evolving

I've worked through several major shifts in digital technology.

I started when websites were largely hand-coded.

I watched the web move into content management systems, responsive design, mobile products, cloud platforms, and increasingly sophisticated digital ecosystems.

Now we're entering another major shift through AI.

What hasn't changed is what interests me most:

Understanding complicated problems and making them simpler for people.

That's what has kept me in design for more than 15 years.

I'm at my best when the problem is complex, the constraints are real, the team is multidisciplinary, and there is an opportunity to make something meaningfully better.

I design digital products by understanding the people who use them, the systems that power them, and the businesses they need to serve.

That is the perspective I bring to every product I work on.