Nikhil Singh: Put Yourself Out There
Product Designer
by Elizabeth Lavis
|07 Mar 2025
Nikhil Singh, Experience Designer and Document Cloud Growth for Adobe UX, urges up-and-coming designers to simply take the leap. “Please put yourself out there,” he says. “We all want to see the fantastic things you have built and are passionate about. Mastering a skill or craft should be the goal. Your ability to withstand pain, boredom, and those long hours of practice and intense focus will help you gain the necessary skills. Nobody puts it better than the great Leonardo Da Vinci, ‘ostinato rigore’ or relentless rigor.”
Singh’s personal philosophy hinges on this continual momentum, too. “In the advice of Samuel Beckett, ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail Again. Fail Better’,” he says.
Singh was born into a comfortable suburban environment in India. “Regarding whether where I’m from has influenced my work, the answer is complicated,” he says. “Yes, Indian art heavily influences my visual aesthetic and the choice of symbolism and iconography, but UX design draws a lot from the Bauhaus movement overall. So, it’s a balance of both worlds for me. India is a tough market to design for. Looking through the lens of socioeconomic circumstances, I have learned that India’s collectivist tendencies and family-centric decision-making have informed my design process. We need strong accessibility considerations in India due to varying levels of digital literacy, linguistic and cultural diversity, low bandwidth connectivity, and inclusivity for users with disabilities.”
He considers his path to design a serendipitous one. “After completing my bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering, I joined a young startup in the sales and marketing division,” Singh says. “One day, while working on a marketing campaign, my manager gave me the chance to sketch ideas for social media graphics. His decision changed everything for me.” Singh is self-taught and gravitated to UX design, which blends the worlds of design, engineering, business, and psychology.
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Singh has a four-step design approach. “We discover, define, develop, and deploy,” he says. One key part of crafting a successful design and implementing a good campaign is having the right tools. “At Adobe, we use an agile process for our Product-Led Growth team,” Singh says. “We analyze internal research, past experiments, and industry practices to identify problems and set goals for the year, guided by leadership. Each quarter, we create a charter outlining the specific problems to tackle, ensuring that we have sufficient research for effective design solutions.”
He and his team also use strategy and creativity in tandem for a successful and functional product. “Think of it as a helix, converging and diverging,” Singh says. “That’s the essence.” Still, at the end of the day, the products have to serve their intended purpose. “Form must follow function,” he says. “For me, it’s all about creating useful, usable, and delightful products, services, or systems for users.”
Aside from design, Singh is driven by the general quest to understand who we are and what makes us live in fulfillment and a constant state of flow. He also likes to indulge in his guilty pleasures, like Frisky Radio’s 8-Track Mind Show, hosted by Lemon8, and classic cheeseburgers from Five Guys or In & Out.
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