The human factor: Pragya Sharma on fifteen years of UX, trust, and the work behind the work

Good UX does not start with a brief. It starts with a person who notices something is not working and cares enough to find out why.

Pragya Sharma noticed this early. She was an IT engineering student in India, midway through a four-year degree, and she kept finding herself more interested in how a website looked, felt, and interacted with the users than in how it functioned under the hood. She was not a natural coder, and she knew it. When she graduated and took her first job, the confirmation came quickly. Sitting at a desk, solving the same technical problems every day, she felt none of the pull that kept other engineers there.

"I realised I like research more. I like interacting with people. I like presenting, talking, solving problems that involve other humans. I cannot just sit at my desk and clock out."

She enrolled in a Masters in Interaction Design, arrived in Dubai, and spent thirteen years working with some of the biggest names in the region. She is now Lead UX Designer at Digital of Things.

The thread running through it all is the belief that the real work in UX is human, not technical. And that the best designers are the ones who understand that.

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UX is not what the job description says it is

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Pragya arrived in Dubai as a trained researcher. Her Masters programme in India had followed user-centred design seriously: field research, process, methodology. She had never touched Photoshop.

Her first job here involved designing website banners.

"They treated me as a graphic designer. I was a pure researcher. I had no idea about designing hands-on. I watched my tutorials, I asked people, I found my way. But it was the biggest surprise, thinking I was a UX designer and being asked to do that."

It is a story many practitioners in this region will recognise. The market has matured significantly since 2015, but the confusion between UX and graphic design, between research and aesthetics, still surfaces. At DOT, it is one of the reasons we are deliberate about how we frame the work to clients from the start. Research is not a phase. It is the foundation.

Pragya found her footing, and the project that anchored her understanding of what UX could genuinely be was a CRM built for brokers and property managers, with multiple stakeholders, overlapping workflows, and real operational weight.

"I realised I like SaaS products. It involves more of a CX way of thinking. You get involved with different parties and you find a solution together."

That instinct for context, for the full system around a problem rather than just the screen in front of you, has stayed with her.

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The work behind the work

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For three years, Pragya worked embedded inside a large airline as a product designer through a consultancy. She was an agency resource inside a large corporate team, sitting alongside in-house designers who had not asked for her to be there and were not sure what to make of her.

"They thought we were there to snatch their jobs. They were very secretive. Very competitive, even within the same team."

Her response was not to withdraw, and not to push. She kept what she describes as her ego "at the bottom." She invited people to lunch. She kept trying after repeated knockbacks.

"Towards the end, I cannot name a single person in the design team there who was not my good friend."

Most of her energy in that role went not into deliverables but into creating the conditions where real collaboration could happen. Designers were protective of their work. Knowledge sat in silos. Context got lost between handoffs. She had to solve those problems before she could get to the actual UX problems.

This is something we see regularly in large organisations. The structural and cultural barriers to good UX often matter more than the design challenges themselves. Pragya's experience in that role is a clear example of why integration, trust, and team cohesion are not soft concerns. They are the work.

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The real problem is rarely the stated problem

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Ask Pragya what companies most commonly get wrong about UX and she says that most businesses still treat it as optional. They budget for it when there is time, and cut it when there is not. Part of the problem, she says, is that the field has not done enough to make its value measurable.

"A lot of UXers should be involved in advocating for UX metrics, tangible ways of measuring return on investment. That common understanding does not exist yet, especially in medium-sized businesses."

The deeper issue is not just budgets. It is that clients frequently arrive with a solution already in mind, confident they have identified the problem.

She describes a project where a client came in with two requests: improve the CMS so the team could update content more easily, and refresh the visual design. Both reasonable. Neither was the actual problem.

"Nobody realised that even if you solve the CMS problem, the content is still unfindable. The navigation was the biggest problem, and they had not seen it."

Getting to that truth required user testing, competitive benchmarking, and direct evidence from people trying and failing to find content on the site. Then came the harder part: taking all of that back to the client and making the case clearly.

At DOT, this is a dynamic we return to regularly. The problem a client brings us is usually real. It is rarely the whole picture. Research is how we close that gap, and how we earn the credibility to redirect when the brief needs redirecting.

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Detachment is a professional skill

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There is one thing Pragya says she had to actively unlearn as she grew in her career. Not a technical skill. Not a methodology gap.

"[Do not] falling in love with your own creation. The more attached you get, someone will criticise it and it will affect you personally. I had to learn to stay disconnected, to treat my work as something people may like or not, and not let that land on me."

In journalism, there is a phrase for this: kill your darlings. She laughs when she hears it. "Basically, yes."

It sounds simple, and it is not. Designers who learn it properly become better collaborators because they stop defending and start listening. The question shifts from "do you like it?" to "does it work?" At DOT, that distinction matters in every client engagement, every review, every round of research findings. The work belongs to the problem, not to the person who made it.

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Leading means bringing people with you

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Pragya has led teams across her in-house and agency career, including a team of three at one of her previous roles. Asked whether doing UX work or leading it is harder, she does not pick one.

"Both are equally hard. But what requires more skill is leading. You need to bring people together. Protecting the team, resolving differences, keeping everyone moving in the same direction, that is a bigger challenge than getting down and doing the work."

She does not mentor by telling people what to do. She sits down with them and works through the problem together.

"I sit down with the person, and we solve the problem together. We both learn in that process."

On hiring, she talks about learning to spot reverse engineering. Candidates who complete a design and then construct a process around it retrospectively, to make it look like they followed methodology. After enough interviews, she says, the pattern becomes unmistakable. What she is looking for is evidence of genuine thinking. The kind that only comes from working through ambiguity honestly.

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The Middle East is where the opportunity is

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Pragya has worked in a mature UX market, and she knows what it looks like when the field is well understood, properly resourced, and respected inside an organisation. The Middle East is not fully there yet.

"To find UXers who really understand what UX design is, and practice it seriously, is still rare here. That is the uniqueness of the market. More opportunity, fewer people working at that level."

It is part of what drew her to DOT. So was the prospect of building out dot Academy, mentoring the next generation of practitioners, and working on UserQ, a platform that addresses research infrastructure challenges she has encountered throughout her career.

"I love teaching. I love mentoring. And I am a full-time UXER. When you are working in UX, you are testing continuously. Here, all of that comes together."

At DOT, Pragya's experience across in-house and agency environments, across markets and industries, is exactly the kind of perspective that keeps our work grounded. Not just knowing the right methods, but understanding the human and organisational dynamics that determine whether good UX actually lands.

The human factor, as she puts it, is what we are all here to work on.

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Want to know more about how DOT approaches UX design and research in the MENA region? Get in touch and let's talk.