Arun Franklin

Experience

5+ years across SaaS, mobility & e-commerce

2025 — Present

Simplotel Now

Senior Product Designer

Leading design for a hotel booking engine used by 3,000+ properties globally. Driving design system initiatives and mentoring junior designers.

Redesigned booking flow · +22% conversion
Built end-to-end design system
Led cross-functional design sprints

2023 — 2025

DRIFE

Product Designer

Designed the end-to-end ride-hailing experience for a Web3-powered mobility platform across rider and driver apps.

Designed driver & rider mobile apps
Onboarding redesign · −35% drop-off
Established UX research practices

2021 — 2023

Melento

UI/UX Designer

Sole designer for a full enterprise platform — 6 interconnected products built from scratch with a shared design system.

Designed CRM, MSpace, MPlan, MTicket, Mreach + Automation
CRM adoption: 60% → 100% · +122% lead conversion
No-code automation builder used daily by non-technical ops teams

2019 — 2021

Freelance

UI/UX Designer

Worked with startups and small businesses on websites, mobile apps, and brand identities.

3 client projects shipped
Cross-industry portfolio developed
Client management & stakeholder alignment

Tools & Skills

A refined toolkit built over 5+ years

Design

Figma
Adobe XD
Photoshop
Illustrator
After Effects

Research

Maze
HotJar
Google Analytics
Dovetail
UserTesting

Collaboration

Jira
Notion
Miro
Slack
Confluence

Core Competencies

User Research Wireframing Prototyping Design Systems Usability Testing A/B Testing Information Architecture Interaction Design Visual Design Design Thinking Agile / Scrum Stakeholder Management

"Complexity isn't the problem. Unclear thinking is."

— How I approach every brief

Empathy before pixels

Understanding people is the actual design work. Research, observation, listening — these come before any tool is opened.

Solve the right problem

Most design failures are actually problem-definition failures. I invest heavily in understanding what's actually broken before proposing solutions.

Collaboration ships better products

The best work is built with engineers, PMs, and data teams from day one — not handed off after the fact.

Details are the product

Micro-interactions, loading states, empty states, error handling — these aren't polish, they're the experience.

About

Designing for people,
not portfolios.

I got into design because I love software but couldn't write my way past "Hello World." What pulled me in wasn't the aesthetics — it was the gap between how powerful technology can be and how badly most people feel using it. That gap felt like a problem I could actually solve.

My process runs in two modes. When I'm understanding users, I take the designer hat off completely — I think like someone who has better things to do than figure out your product. When I'm with stakeholders, I switch gears: thinking in business terms, edge cases, timelines, and tradeoffs. The design happens in the space between those two modes.

I'm not interested in beautiful screens that don't ship or clever interactions that confuse real people. I care about clarity at scale — products where getting a flow right isn't a nice-to-have, it's whether millions of people can do something they actually need to do.

Currently

Senior Product Designer at Simplotel — building booking and CRM products used by 3,000+ hotels across India and Southeast Asia.

Background

5+ years across hotel-tech, healthcare SaaS, and enterprise CRM. I've owned full end-to-end design: research → wireframes → prototypes → shipped product.

When I'm not designing

On a football or basketball court, deep in a video game, or occasionally painting. The games aren't a guilty pleasure — feedback loops, progression systems, and intuitive controls have taught me more about interaction design than most textbooks.

Football Basketball Gaming Painting

What's next

Products at a scale where design decisions move real outcomes for millions of people. Enterprise SaaS, AI-native tools, or consumer products where clarity is the feature.

Selected Work