Principal UI/UX Designer · Victoria, AU
Hi, I'm Mugs Balakrishnan.
I'm a designer with a decade of experience across UI and UX. I've spent most of that time in government, community services, and other public-facing spaces where design decisions shape the services people rely on.
I came into design through software development. Close to ten years of writing code and leading technical teams before the shift. That background still shapes how I work. I can sit in an engineering conversation and follow what's actually feasible, write specs developers can act on, and make design decisions that hold up once they meet the build.
The move into UX felt like a natural extension. I was already thinking about how systems behave and how people move through them. Design gave me the language and the methods to put that thinking into practice.
My work brings together research, structure, and plain language. The design has to work for the person using it. Can they finish what they came to do? Does the language make sense the first time they read it? Does the structure match how they think about the problem?
When those three are right, the design does its job.