Payoshni Kulkarni

I strive to design words that create enlightening experiences and "a-ha moments".

I worked as a digital news producer at CNBC India's online partner Moneycontrol.com. The news organisation wanted to attract existing business news audience towards general news, for a brand famous for financial news. As a digital news producer, I worked on the social media strategy, handled the official twitter handle of 1.5 million followers, copyedited international, national & finance news, produced videos, wrote scripts and published about 200 articles. We were able to increase the social media audience by at-least 60% and increased the readership by at least 35% in a span of six months.

After this,
I worked as a Features Writer at Dhandhapedia.com, wrote explainer articles about complex topics such policy evolvements and women's issues. Here, I worked on the branding, content discovery, and delivery for an upcoming business features website for detailed explainers of policy evolvements. We experimented with a lot of categories and measured the time span people take to read, skim and absorb. We were able gain to gain a weekly audience of 5000 viewers who were interested specifically in how we wrote content.

MS in HCI/d

Research
In the MS program, I learnt to amalgamate ethnography skills learnt in journalism with design thinking and strategy. I worked on NSF research project investigating the impact of caregivers' burnout. Problem statements such as, "How might we provide better care to home-health care workers." I honed a mixed methods research approach, combined with quantitative research methods to formulate design directions. I also learnt to find a healthy balance between business and stakeholders needs. While I have always relied on words to convey an experience - learning visual storytelling, product-thinking and experience design have elevated my understanding of communication.

Teaching
Getting the full academic experience, I also worked as an Associate Instructor at the Luddy School of Informatics teaching - Information ethics, Social Informatics and getting promoted to Lead Associate Instructor for peer-to-peer learning in Informatics. This was a class of undergraduate instructors and my goal was to assist the professor to have tough conversations about inclusivity in a classroom, role of teachers, boundaries..

Most recently, I worked with the City of Bloomington, Office of Innovation to work on understanding the meaning of transparency in the context of public service website. I worked with Salesforce on a project to understand mental models of early stage marketers. I also worked with Lucidchart on reimagining the onboarding flow.