Harshita Dandu

Assisting faculty in delivering studio-based art & design to K-12 students from public schools, at the Saturday Art School and Design Initiative for Community Empowerment (DICE)

The DX Center is a faculty-led, student-driven UX consultancy and academic research lab in the School of Information at Pratt Institute. Saciva | Oct'24 - Present - Optimizing Saciva’s AI-driven networking platform through post-beta user research, helping users complete core tasks quickly while encouraging repeat visits to explore additional features - Conducting moderated usability evaluation tests to provide design improvements for task flows and information retrieval to resolve learnability and trust gaps

Designed a website and responsive web platform for Homezen’s end-to-end customer journey, from first visit to booked consultation. - Crafted 0→1 flows for onboarding, discovery, and booking a consultation directly from the website. - Interviewed users and ran usability tests, then used the insights to streamline flows, polish interactions, and improve discovery paths. - Collaborated with the founder and marketing team on positioning, content, and launch.

- Promoted to a leadership position, overseeing workflow management and team performance. - ⁠Trained, guided, and mentored team members to ensure high-quality data analysis and project execution. - ⁠Implemented internal communication strategies, increasing team engagement and reducing project turnaround.

Worked across multiple industry-leading conversational AI models, evaluating responses and shaping human-centered, trustworthy product experiences. - Stress-tested AI models by inducing errors, documenting failures, and turning findings into better recovery, comprehension, accuracy, and reasoning. - Boosted performance and reliability by giving clear feedback on training methods and using Python, JavaScript, Java, SQL, C++, and other languages to build tests, tools, and evaluations. - Collaborated with engineers and researchers to refine AI capabilities while mentoring junior trainers on workflows.

At HPE, I had the opportunity to work on an internal tool focusing on improving usability, automation, and tester workflows for Aruba CX switches. - Built SoakMaster, a dashboard that automated soak testing, cutting setup time from 1–2 hrs/day to under 5 mins. - Designed a real-time monitoring interface to visualize CPU, memory, and error logs, helping testers detect issues faster. - Ran usability sessions with the testing team and improved workflows and form inputs.

Grade: 4.0 Merit scholarship holder Teaching Assistant (K12 Center) Coursework- UX for AR-VR, Practical Ethnography, Projects in IXD, Usability Theory, Information Architecture