Himanshu Kalra — Bangalore → Berlin
Four-plus years of research across cybersecurity, fintech, entertainment, fashion and online media — consultancy and embedded. Currently at Trellix, studying how people decide to trust AI when the stakes are high.
Answer · Reversibility is not reliability
A security team will trust an autonomous AI to reconstruct an attack. It will not trust the same AI to act on one. That gap is built into the architecture, not the sentiment.
OutcomeReframed the product's autonomy architecture before launch, and reset three shipping decisions about what an AI may act on, how it is corrected, and how its confidence is shown.
Answer · The most important column wasn't on the list
A security console framed a design choice as which of 27 fields to show by default. The field analysts reached for most was not among the 27. What they said and what they did pointed to the same answer.
OutcomeCut 27 candidate columns to 8 evidence-backed defaults, surfaced a missing priority-zero field before build, and reset the hash and timeline decisions.
Answer · The redesign experts rejected
A security platform shipped a modern redesign, and expert analysts kept preferring the build it replaced. Preferring the old version was not resistance to change. It was a precise signal about what the redesign had removed.
OutcomeDiagnosed the adoption regression across a multi-round program - 45 participants across 11 organizations, plus a 67-analyst operations study - prioritized three Tier-1 blockers, and drove fixes into the roadmap. Two of four shipped within a release.
UX Researcher II in cybersecurity — B2B, enterprise, regulated. Security analysts get an AI verdict on every alert; some believe it, some override it, and the difference isn't what the vendors think. Three case studies from this work are above.
117 interactive worksheets my partner and I use to learn German for a life abroad — adaptive review of what we keep getting wrong, progress synced across devices.
An editorial catalogue of 62 objects that have outlived their trends — every photograph re-shot into a uniform studio look by a custom image pipeline. Made with Sharmi. Launching soon.
Associate, then Senior UX Researcher at a strategic foresight and innovation consultancy. Led and supported nine-plus generative and evaluative studies for clients including Google and YouTube. Led the team's GenAI integration — mapped our research processes, built custom tools that cut study turnaround in half while improving quality.
User requirements research for the MVP of a stocks-investment app. Two hundred-plus one-on-one user interactions to uncover friction across funnels, surveys to size and prioritise the issues, moderated usability testing to close the loop.
Field research with drivers, warehouse managers and contractors for an employee-focused project — interviews and analysis that surfaced their needs and pain points and streamlined the internal system.
Business and editorial strategist at a media platform for architects and designers. Coordinated a hundred-plus writers across eight-plus countries, picked topics through keyword research, analytics and reader surveys, and co-facilitated a workshop on architectural journalism.
Registered Architect — practice in Jaipur, co-authored and presented case studies on citizen-initiated sustainable projects. The research habit started here too: fifty-plus interviews about eating habits for a food-delivery startup, as a design intern in Ahmedabad.